Union IT Minister calls for National movement to make India truly digital society

Sh. Prasad said the government supports the independence of social media but utmost care should be taken to ensure that it does not rupture the National fabric.

Union Minister of Electronics & IT and Law & Justice, Sh. Ravi Shankar Prasad today called for a National movement spearheaded by IT professionals to make India a truly digital society. He urged IT community reach out to the deserving and underprivileged section and make them digitally literate. This, he said, would help the government in achieving the goal of transforming India into a digital society and also catalyze efforts to make all sections of society benefit from Government services and initiatives.

He said the government has provided two lac Datasets on open data platform to provide an opportunity for innovation to all. He said the government does not encourage data to be available for privileged few only as mass involvement in these initiatives would give better and earlier results. Sh. Prasad said the government supports the independence of social media but utmost care should be taken to ensure that it does not rupture the National fabric.

Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India is at the forefront of promoting innovation in Open Data ecosystem in India. It has been set-up by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in compliance with the Open Data Policy whose objective is to provide a platform for proactive access to Government-owned shareable data. These datasets are directly published on the platform by the Government Departments.

Till date, OGD India has 2,29,793 dataset resources, 4,431 catalogues contributed by 137 Ministry/Departments (85 Central and 52 States), 1,500 Visualizations created, 7860 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) created, 196 Chief Data Officers (105 Central and 91 States). OGD India has 17.13 million times viewed and 6.22 million datasets have been downloaded.

The Open Government Data Team, National Informatics Centre (NIC) in association with Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) & Start-Up India had organized Hackathon - "#OpenGovDataHack" for Students, Entrepreneurs, Innovators, Start-ups, Developers and Community to create unique and innovative service delivery Applications & Info-Graphics to foster innovation. sectors selected for the Hackathon are Water & Sanitation, Transport, Education, Crime and Health. The Hackathon was conducted successfully in 2 phases. The National screening committee shortlisted 20 Apps for final presentation out of which 3 (three winning) apps and 7(seven) other excellence apps will be felicitated in an award event on 1st November 2018 by the Hon'ble Union Minister.

Recognizing the importance of making open data available to its citizens for increased levels of proactive transparency and accountability and to promote higher level of public participation, the Government of India under the aegis of National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) initiated Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India to share government data with its citizens. This has built a foundation to create an open data ecosystem in the country.

OGD demonstrated its potential to the App Developers‟ Community through various contests. #OpenGovDataHack Hackathon event has been conducted in 7 Cities – Surat, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Jaipur, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and an online since September 2017. In the second phase of the event, 43 shortlisted Apps were given mentorship from Industry experts. A national screening committee has shortlisted 20 Apps for final Jury round. OGD has also organized other events such as „12th Plan Hackathon‟, „In Pursuit Of an Idea‟, „CMA Hackathon‟, etc. For engaging industry, one of such event „#OpenDataApps Challenge‟ was launched in association with NASSCOM and another event "Code for Honor 2014" was launched with Microsoft. A dedicated event portal has been created for the management of workshops, hackathons, challenges, etc. OGD has been organizing events/apps challenges/hackathons & workshops/training/awareness sessions including state-level workshops.

(With Inputs from PIB)