Technology
National Policy on Data Dissemination Announced
Pressure from IMF bears fruit
While the successive government trying their level best to avoid discussing the Right to Information bill in the Parliament, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been able to push Indian government to take the issue of data dissemination seriously. The cabinet approved the national policy on dissemination of statistical data. According to the new policy, a data warehouse would be created with department of statistics as the nodal agency for its dissemination.
Under its commitment to IMF, the government has announced that it proposes to liberalize its policy on availability of sensitive or confidential data and information. New guidelines will be formulated in this regard in the new legislation on right to information. Till the new act on information is adopted by parliament, various departments in the government will be entitled to decide as to what information is sensitive or confidential.
Making this announcement, Minister of state for Programme and Planning Implementation, Ram Naik indicated that the confidentiality or sensitivity clause in the new information act will be in consonance with the Government’s commitment to International Monetary Fund (IMF) in this regard.
He said that now India is all set to subscribe to the Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDSS) of the IMF. The Indian system would be available on IMF’s Internet site fully devoted to this standard. Although subscription is voluntary, it carries a commitment by the subscribing member to adhere to the standards and to provide information to the IMF about the practices in disseminating economic and financial data. India had sought two year time frame to adapt to the new accounting system, proposed by IMF. One year of this transition period is already completed. It is hoped that posting of macro-economic data on the bulletin of the IMF in terms of the SDDS agreement would be compiled with by the end of December this year.
The Department of Statistics has been charged with the responsibility of posting the Index of Industrial Production (II) and the Consumer Price index within six weeks of their compilation while it has three months to report figures of quarterly growth of gross domestic product (GDP) and the situation of the labour force. Most of the work in complying with the IMF norms has been completed by the Department of Statistics except for the data on the labour force.
Impact of this policy on other Data
The government has decided to go public with most of the official statistics collected all over the country but not published so far. For a price, individuals and institutions can now approach the Department of Statistics for their specific data requirement; which will be made available either in the printed form or on the computer floppies.
Mr. Ram Naik said that every year considerable data collection had been undertaken at huge public cost in terms of manpower, material and financial resources. However, only a fraction of this data was published or made available through media reports. Most of the other relevant data remained unavailable to the general public and was also not available at one print. For instance, data pertaining to issues being dealt with Home Ministry remained with that Ministry while that pertaining to agriculture remained with the Ministry of Agriculture. The public in most cases was not aware of what data was available, nor did it know where to get it from.
Consequently, the Government has decided that the Department of Statistics will now act as a ‘Data warehouse’, where all the data from the various ministries of the Central Government as well as from the States would be available to the public. The Department of Statistics will also publish a directory of the unpublished data available with it for public use. This directory would also be published on the website of the Department.
The price of the data to be supplied would include the cost of stationary, computer consumables and computer time for sorting information. The cost of collection of the data and validation of data would not be charged. Postal charges would also be included along with the cost of the data.
Mr. Naik, however, said that data considered sensitive by the source agencies would not be shared with the public. Since no guidelines had yet been formulated on what constituted sensitive or secret data, it had been left to the organisation concerned either at the Central or the State Government level to decide which data would be held back. The Minister also said that once the legislation on Right to Information got ready, guidelines would be laid down on the definition of sensitive or secret data. The minister also announced that the Department of Statistics had decided to make available all relevant data within three years of collection at the most. In cases the analysis of data was undertaken before the three-year period, it would be made public. This time frame had been set down since there was a tendency to delay the publication of collected data, with the result that if and when it was published, it became irrelevant.