Unlike the North, countries in the Global South have limited legacy regulations around collection and use of data. While several countries in the developing world have an office of National Statistics or equivalent entities, there has been a scarcity of large scale organised projects towards the collection and analysis of data besides in traditional domains such as census, sample surveys etc. Consequently, there has also been a lack of sufficient regulation around data, particularly recent practices of large scale collection, analytics and insights, broadly described as big data.
With the growth of big data analytics, various privacy concerns have arisen connected to the loss of control over one’s personal data. Even though there is no specific legislation in India that exclusively governs big data, other legislation exists govern the specific collection, processing, use, dissemination, of data in specific sectors.
In this compendium, we survey the state of data regulation in India and highlight the key public agencies and stakeholders involved. We review the state of data regulation in the following sectors: Collection of statistics, Data Protection, Financial data, Healthcare data, Open data, the right to information, database rights, copyright, and other big data initiatives in India.
Authored by Anisha Gupta
Edited by Pranav Manjesh Bidare and Amber Sinha
Supported by the Big Data for Development network established by International Development Research Centre, Canada
Published on PubPub developed and hosted by MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group
Shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license