The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy will apply to all data and information created, generated, collected and archived using public funds provided by Government of India directly or through authorized agencies by various Ministries/Departments/Organizations/Agencies and Autonomous bodies.

The principles on which data sharing and accessibility need to be based include: Openness, Flexibility, Transparency, Quality, Security and Machine-readable.

The Department of Science and Technology is serving the nodal functions of coordination and monitoring of policy through close collaboration with all Central Ministries and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology by creating data.gov.in through National Informatics Centre (NIC).

As per NDSAP, every Department has to identify datasets by the following categories:

Negative List: The datasets, which are confidential in nature and would compromise to the county’s security if made public, are put into this list. The datasets which contain personal information are also included in this list.

Open List: This list comprises of datasets which don’t fall under negative list. These datasets shall be prioritized into high value datasets and non-high values datasets.

NDSAP recommends that datasets has to be published in an open format. It should be machine readable. Considering the current analysis of data formats prevalent in Government, it is proposed that data should be published in any of the following formats:

• CSV (Comma separated values)
• XLS (Spread sheet - Excel)
• ODS/OTS (Open Document Formats for Spreadsheets)
• XML (Extensive Markup Language)
• RDF (Resources Description Framework)
• KML (Keyhole Markup Language used for Maps)
• GML (Geography Markup Language)
• RSS/ATOM (Fast changing data e.g. hourly/daily)

Different types of datasets generated both in geospatial and non-spatial form by Ministries/Departments shall be classified as shareable data and non-shareable data.

The derived statistics like national accounts statistics, indicators like price index, databases from census and surveys are the types of data produced by a statistical mechanism. However, the geospatial data consists primarily of satellite data, maps, etc. In such a mechanism, it becomes important to maintain standards in respect of metadata, data layout and data access policy.

The implementation of National Data Sharing and Access Policy is expected to entail expenditures for both data owners and data managers for analog to digital conversion, data refinement, data storage, quality up-gradation etc. Budgetary provisions and appropriate support for data management for each Department/Organization by Government of India would be met from their internal budget for the formation of NDSAP cell.

Data about the data is called metadata. Information about the datasets being published through a standard structure comprising of controlled vocabularies on government sectors, dataset types, jurisdictions, access mode, etc. Apart from facilitating easy access to data, it is useful for federation & integration of data catalog.

Please go through following steps to download and install the ssl certificate to avoid error.

• Save and extract the file in the required location.
• Released dataset should clearly reflect “what is recorded about a particular subject”.
• Right click on the saved file and select Install Certificate. The Certificate Import wizard appears.
• Click Next. The Welcome window appears.
• Click Next. The Certificate Store window appears with the 'Automatically select the certificate store...' option selected by default.
• Click Finish. The message, 'Do you want to ADD the following certificate to the root store?' is displayed.
• Click Yes. You will receive the message, 'The import was successful.

In order to implement NDSAP, each Department would establish a NDSAP Cell. The size of the cell would vary from Department to Department and would depend on the quantum of datasets to be published.

The main role & responsibilities of a Chief Data Officer are as follows:

• Lead the open data initiative of Department/Organization
• Nominate Data Contributors
• Create Data Contributors login id. using Chief Data Officer’s login account
• Take initiative to release as many datasets as possible on proactive basis.
• Identify the High Value Datasets and schedule their release on OGD Platform.
• Prepare the Negative List for the Department as per the directions in NDSAP.
• Ensures that the datasets being published, through a workflow process, are in compliance with NDSAP.
• Periodically monitor the release of datasets as per predefined schedule.
• Take relevant action on the feedback/suggestion received from the citizen for the datasets belonging to the Ministry/Department/Organization.
• Ensure the correctness of his contact details on the OGD Platform by sending a mail/ letter to
• ndsap[at]gov[dot]in, in case of any change.
• Take action on Suggestions on new datasets made by public through the OGD Platform.

The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy will apply to all data and information created, generated, collected and archived using public funds provided by Government of India directly or through authorized agencies by various Ministries/Departments/Organizations/Agencies and Autonomous bodies.

Datasets are contributed through a web-based Data Management System under http://data.gov.in. This simple interface can be accessed after login to the system. Nominated Chief Data Officers can directly login with the OGD Platform using their NIC EMAIL credentials.

Chief Data Officers, without having NIC EMAIL account, can obtain the login credentials (user name and password) on their existing non NIC EMAIL ID if mentioned in their nomination letter.

Datasets along with the metadata once contributed by the Data Contributor goes through the predefined workflow to the Chief Data Officer who in turn ensures that it is in compliance with the NDSAP Policy and pushes it to NDSAP PMU for publishing on the OGD Platform.

The NDSAP PMU at NIC headquarters pushes the datasets from unpublished state to the published state.

The implementation of National Data Sharing and Access Policy is expected to entail expenditures for both data owners and data managers for analog to digital conversion, data refinement, data storage, quality up-gradation etc. Budgetary provisions and appropriate support for data management for each Department/Organization by Government of India would be met from their internal budget for the formation of NDSAP cell.

In order to implement NDSAP, the Ministries/Departments of Government of India have to undertake the following activities:

• Nominate Chief Data Officer, at the level of Joint Secretary or above
• Chief Data Officer to nominate Data Contributors for coordinating from respective Divisions/Units/Projects/Schemes, etc.
• Create Data Contributor’s login id. using Chief Data Officer’s login account
• Setup NDSAP Cell
• Identify Datasets
• Prepare Negative List
• Publish Datasets on OGD Platform India
• Create Action Plan for regular release of datasets on the data.gov.in
• Monitor and Manage the Open Data Program of the Department

As per the directive from the Cabinet Secretary, a senior officer at the level of Joint Secretary or above is to be nominated as Chief Data Officer or Nodal Officer for the Department/Organization.

NDSAP PMU can be contacted at ndsap[at]gov[dot]in or at Phone: 011-24363692, 011-24305395, 011-24305370, Fax: 011-24368854

In order to implement NDSAP, each Department would establish a NDSAP Cell. The size of the cell would vary from Department to Department and would depend on the quantum of datasets to be published.

NDSAP aims to provide an enabling provision and platform for proactive and open access to the data generated by various Government of India entities.

The objective of this policy is to facilitate access to Government of India owned shareable data (along with its usage information) in machine readable form through a wide area network all over the country in a periodically updatable manner, within the framework of various related policies, acts and rules of Government of India, thereby permitting a wider accessibility and usage by public.

In order to cater to the contribution of the datasets from offices/organization under the Ministries/ Departments, the Chief Data Officer can nominate a number of Data Contributors who would be responsible in contributing the datasets along with their metadata. Data Contributor could be an officer of the Ministry/Department who would be responsible for his/her unit/division. The responsibilities of the Data Contributor are as follows:

Responsible for ensuring quality and correctness datasets of his/her unit/division.

Preparing and contributing the metadata in the predefined format for the datasets.

The main activities of NDSAP, PMU would be to manage the Open Government Data Platform India, provide Technical Advice to the departments, handhold for dataset contribution as well as capacity building of Data Contributors and Chief Data Officers.

Some of the best practices for contribution are as follows:

• Data should be stored in widely used file formats that are suitable for machine processing.
• Released dataset should clearly reflect “what is recorded about a particular subject”.
• Timely release of datasets is one of the important factors to maximize the utility of information people can obtain.
• Data should be provided in freely available formats which can be accessed without the need for a software license.
• Data elements should be in de-normalized form