TS data policy to open doors for innovation

Individuals & start-ups expected to evolve societal solutions

Hyderabad: The Telangana government’s Open Data Policy is meant to encourage innovation in developing solutions in Government-to-Citizen (G2C) services in the State.

According to State Information Technology Department (SITD), as part of this, the data related to different government departments have been made available for interested individuals and start-ups.

Elaborating the reason for unveiling 'Open Data Policy", SITD, Principal Secretary Jayesh Ranjan said that the department had formed an Emerging Technologies Wing (ETW) with eight technologies coming under it. They include Internet of Things (IoT), Data Analytics (DA) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the like.

"Emerging technologies have tremendous potential of predictability with which it is possible to come up with innovative solutions to address the grey areas," he said.

For example, sharing of patient records of LV Prasad Eye Institute with Microsoft has led to the later coming up with a refined data analytics tool with potential predictability to figure out the child developing eye-related ailments over a period of time.

Using this technology, the State government has conducted screening of tens and thousands of school children in Telangana. In turn, this helped in figuring out the children who would possibly develop eye ailment at some point of time in future.

These findings give an opportunity to take corrective action and measure to avoid such ailments and even avoidable blindness.

"Such technological interventions have a strong impact on many families in taking care of their children to avoid corrective actions," he said, adding: "It is only one example of how the Telangana government’s information technology department has been augmenting the technological prowess of the emerging technologies to improve service delivery to the citizens.”

It was realising this potential of the technologies that the State government has come up with the data policy to collaborate with anyone coming up with solutions in the G2C services having social impact and improve the lives of the people.

"The IT SITD will clear the data to be deployed in the public domain and the data sets could be used by any individual or start-ups to collaborate and to come up with solutions having social impact," he said.