“Tamil Nadu has been a State that has given birth to many pioneering schemes of public importance that have been replicated even nationally. These can be attributed to astute leadership and ground-level connection of the political leadership and a responsive bureaucracy” - Dr.V. Irai Anbu, Chief Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu. 

Following the same vision, the Government of Tamil Nadu has formulated the Tamil Nadu Data Policy, 2022. Aimed at harnessing data for effective decision-making, the policy is expected to support policy-making, improve implementation of schemes, encourage value-added services, improve access to and quality of services, and thus provide an excellent base for effective governance. 

The Policy adopted the use of “data for the public good” as its soul and laid the following objectives ahead of it: 

• Develop data capabilities to address all phases of governance 
• Promote the data analytics capability of all the departments 
• Minimize inclusion/exclusion errors in Government schemes 
• Drive data-based assessment of the efficacy of schemes 
• Make data publicly available for policy research and for improving transparency 

It is based on 13 guiding principles namely Openness; Privacy, Ethics, and Equity; Flexibility; Transparency; Legal Conformity; IPR protection; Interoperability and Standards; Quality; Security; Accountability and formal responsibility; and Sustainability and Usability. 

The policy would be applicable to all public authorities under the RTI Act within the State of Tamil Nadu. It would apply to all data generated, created, collected, and archived via the public funds of the Tamil Nadu government either directly or by authorized agencies of various departments and autonomous bodies. It would also apply to legacy data available in the non-machine-readable format as well as recurring data generated due to automation. 

The Tamil Nadu Data Policy would result in the launch of the Tamil Nadu Open Data Portal, collaborations with academic and research institutions, creation of an inter-departmental data exchange platform, a data ecosystem for data-driven decision support system (DeTN), a spatial data infrastructure, and a population health registry. As per the policy, the state of Tamil Nadu would adopt a mix of centralized and federated data storage systems. 

“A State Level Empowered Data Governance Committee (EDGC) headed by the Chief Secretary will provide strategic guidance for the State data policy framework. A Data Inter-Departmental Committee (DIDC) headed by the CeO, TNeGA, the State’s Chief Data Officer (CDO) will take operational level decisions emanating from the Policy”, specified the policy. 

It further stated, “The Department Data Officer in each department shall be responsible for its department data collection, decisions relating to open data, storage, compliance to the Policy and carry out the decisions of the Data Inter-Departmental Committee (DIDC).” The data policy has been issued in harmony with multiple stakeholder departments including the Department of Planning, Development, and Special Initiatives as well as the Economics and Statistics Department. 

The Tamil Nadu Data Policy promises several benefits to various departments and organizations: 

• Providing easy access to government-owned data, citizens, as well as public and private institutions, will be able to use this resource for social good 
• Standardization of user profiles will help departmental databases to become uniform and create cross-functional applications 
• Adhering to common standards during the collection, transfer, and sharing of data would help integrate different data sets thus, enriching the data and providing an integrated perspective to the policymaker 
• Sharing open Government data will help small companies and start-ups bring out innovative data-related products. This will also create new jobs in the field of analytics and data processing 
• The policy would also minimize exclusion errors, provide a framework to protect citizen privacy rights, and encourage transparency in the use of data by citizens/ third parties 

The Government of Tamil Nadu is also aiming to solve several operational challenges through TNDP. Some of these are: 

• Government systems capture citizens’ names in different formats. So, the same citizen will be represented in multiple ways in multiple databases. This can lead to accidental or purposeful duplication. Most databases lack a family identifier, and this is a problem for family-based entitlements 
• There are different kinds of addresses – permanent, residence, and communication addresses. For different purposes, citizens give different addresses. Hence, a single source of the correct address for a citizen is not usually defined 
• Some databases support multi-language fields or names, addresses, and a lot of other attributes. The fields that support multiple languages are not consistent across multiple databases. This includes numeric and text fields too 
• Many citizens face exclusion errors in some schemes. These could be redressed by cross-referencing data in other schemes to ensure they are not denied benefits, subsidies, and services they are entitled to under the law 

As Dr. Neeraj Mittal, Principal Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu quotes, “Tamil Nadu Data Policy is an outcome-focused policy that aims to improve policymaking and benefits disbursement through innovative use of data to improve scheme implementation, encourage value-added services by data sharing, improve access and quality of services, encourage creativity and innovation.” 

It will be interesting to how the policy gets implemented and how many sectors reap its benefits.