Livemint: Pune: Wednesday, October
12, 2016.
Being the
birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri, 2 October is not
only an important day in Indian context, it also sits next to the Independence
and Republic days in terms of announcement of new policies, programmes and
schemes by governments at all levels in the country.
One among
those was the news of unveiling of an Open Government Data (OGD) Portal by the
Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), the first-of-its kind in the country by an
urban local governing body.
The idea of
OGD is not new, a National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) was
drafted in 2012, and the idea recently got a much-needed push at the central
level with launch of the revamped OGD portal (data.gov.in).
Variants of
this portal have been replicated by many state governments as well. The lack of
availability of hyper local level data was one of the primary reasons why
evidence based policy formulation is not common at city level.
In our
rapidly urbanizing country, faulty urbanization policies continue to adversely
impact the lives of millions of citizens across generations. The idea of a
‘Smart City’ hinges on how real time and historic data can be utilized to
deliver citizen services like clean water, public transportation, open spaces
and better livelihood opportunities for migrant population. PMC’s portal is a
welcome step towards this end.
RTI and
Open Data
The Right to
Information Act (2005) undoubtedly heralded the era of increased transparency
and accountability across government machinery in the country and brought about
some fundamental changes in the way citizens could interact with governments at
all levels. The RTI-enabled decade saw some important reforms in governance,
now the time is right to address few of the shortcomings of the Act.
Important
among these are the allegations of RTI been used to slow down policy
formulation and implementation by those with vested interests. Also, RTI is
primarily used by organized citizen groups, activists and NGOs more than
individual citizens owing to the time consuming processes and lack of awareness
regarding the various formats in which information can be asked for by
citizens. The average time for a RTI query to be answered is still in the
30-day bracket, this tells us that we need to move to a model that is more
citizen centric in application and real time in delivery.
Open Data,
which is the practice of hosting public data that is non-sensitive in nature,
pertaining to a multitude of government actions that is made available for free
and which can be used by citizens for social, economic and developmental
purposes, presents itself as the next step after RTI. In fact, clause 4 of the
RTI Act itself talks about suo moto disclosure of information and data by
government departments so that when it comes to standard information
availability the dependence on RTI queries can be reduced. PMC’s OGD portal
same model at city level will help to channelize citizen centric transition
from RTI to Open Data at a much faster pace.
Liberating
Data for Citizens
The mere
availability of data in public domain does not bring a transformation in
governance. Citizens would need to become active stakeholders in this
transformation if they wish to see their cities becoming better places to live,
if not necessarily smarter. Open data is a right step in this direction. The
PMC has already provided the functionality to ask for specific data sets and
seek clarification or information from respective data officer on the portal.
To nudge
citizen participation the PMC should first reach out to citizen groups and
elucidate to them the benefits of data in public domain. As activist and
citizen organization become accustomed to the change, they will pass on the
message to citizens who usually do not interact with government machinery.
Educational and research institutions can be taken on board as knowledge
partners and specific projects can be assigned to them that mandate use of the
newly available data.
Most
importantly, this data can be used to prepare updated ‘Corporator Report Cards’
to assess the performance of local legislators as elections to the Corporation
are due early next year. This will probably be the single most empowering
aspect of this portal as it will allow individual citizens to track the work
done by their representative real time. Another way in which the PMC can engage
citizen is by arranging regular ‘Hackathons’ to crowd source analysis,
translation or even policy research around the data sets available.
Connecting
data with citizens
Credit must
be given to Kunal Kumar, presently Commissioner of the PMC and Rahul Jagtap,
head of PMC’s information technology department, for conceiving and
successfully implementing the first stage of this project. However, in its
present form, the portal, while interactive and user friendly, has a very
limited number of data sets. Most of them are policy documents and performance
reports that were earlier scattered across other PMC websites.
Data sets on
public transport, one of the important areas that need long term policies at
city level are entirely missing from the portal. Similarly not all data sets
are available in vernacular language, this might hamper citizen participation
as English is not the language of choice for day to day communication in the
city. PMC plans to encourage development of mobile applications that link to
the portal to enable tracking of PMC’s work real time, making data available on
a real time basis for these applications would be a challenging ask.
The next step
would be to determine the best possible way in which offline citizens can be
benefitted from online data. How the PMC goes about with this objective will
define the success of the initiative. Failure to use the data to engage
citizens would relegate the OGD portal as yet another of those vendor driven
‘e-governance’ initiatives that had been hailed as governance reforms in the
past.
We are
definitely a long way from Open Government Data (OGD) taking over the mantle of
transparency and accountability in governance from RTI but the transition has
begun nonetheless. This beginning on 2 October makes it even more symbolic as
transparency and accountability in governance will help us getting closer to
realizing the fabled Ram Rajya that the father of the nation asked us to aspire
for.
Ranjeet Rane
leads the digital policy team at The Dialogue, an online policy analysis
portal.
.JPG)
.JPG)
