The government must review its proposals on micro-data access

Its proposed rules on the approval of requests would restrict rather than ease the access of researchers to important data-sets

- SANJAY KUMAR & N.K. SHARMA

With the objective of facilitating easy access to official statistics for all users, while implementing a basic requirement for official data (i.e., protecting confidentiality), so that the purpose of data-driven governance and inclusive development is better served, the Union ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI) recently prepared a draft of revised Guidelines for Statistical Data Dissemination and placed it in the public domain for comments.

As the theme indicates, this version proposes to revise MoSPI's 2019 guidelines "to provide seamless access of statistical data to all stakeholders including government, semi-government, private data users, or international agencies, and promote data-driven decision-making."

Since 2019, MoSPI has been sharing aggregated/analyzed data from its bank of data classified as shareable (termed 'open access'). Its micro-data, which includes National Sample Survey (NSS) unit-level data and other numbers, is anonymized and shared through a simple user registration process. Both these types of data are provided free of charge. Presently, while urban frame survey (UFS) maps are priced, user registration is all it takes to access up to a quarter of the total UFS blocks of a town, with authorization needed beyond this limit. Data categories that require registration are termed 'restricted access data'.

In the case of the NSS, anonymized unit-level data is placed in the public domain simultaneously with the government's release of data/reports. This facilitates immediate deeper data analysis.