IT for Change inputted to the public consultation on the Draft National Geospatial Policy, 2021 put out by the Department of Science and Technology.
Our submission emphasized on the fact that physical locations are a shared public resource and the policy supporting wider democratization of geospatial data should allow for equal digital access to the physical shared spaces. Creating and maintaining geospatial data in a constantly changing world is a very resource intensive process. Hence, contributing to a single geospatial data repository, or releasing the collected data into the public domain under open data licences would benefit the Government, private sector, NGOs, and common public, and help achieve the
vision of the policy.
Therefore, we submitted that all data collected, processed and/or shared under this policy should be consistent with the provisions of government of India's horizontal or general data related laws/frameworks, especially the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, and the law that may finally come from it, and with the non-personal data (NPD) framework being developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.