New committees are being established across India’s ministries and states to control how official data is classified and shared, as automated AI access adds urgency to long-standing concerns over fragmented permissions and leaks.
India’s data architecture is moving into a new phase as the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, or MeitY, pushes ministries and states to set up Data Governance Committees that will decide how government information is classified, published and shared. According to The Ken, the National e-Governance Division, which runs DigiLocker, has been tracking compliance since May, and the spreadsheet is gradually filling with green cells as departments move to formalise the process.
The pace picked up in October, when the ministries of culture, micro, small and medium enterprises, and IT itself established their committees in quick succession, The Ken reported. A person familiar with the tracker told the publication that about 38% of central ministries and departments, and 40% of states and union territories, had set up such panels so far. Business Line, Business Standard and other Indian business publications have described the committees as part of MeitY’s broader effort to bring order to government data management and tighten oversight of access rules.
That matters because government records are already deeply embedded in day-to-day commerce. Banks, lenders and telecom firms routinely rely on official databases to verify identities, and Protean eGov Technologies, which handles PAN verification for the Income Tax Department, processed 3.2 billion checks in 2024-25 alone, The Ken said. The paper also noted that the system has often depended on individual arrangements between departments and vendors, creating what it described as side doors rather than a single controlled gateway.
The risks were highlighted in September, when the Internet Freedom Foundation said a Telegram service was selling vehicle owners’ names, addresses and phone numbers from the Vahan database for as little as Rs 5 a record. The episode did not involve a hack, according to the foundation’s account, but rather a chain of legitimate access that appears to have been passed on to others. Against that backdrop, the IT ministry’s move on 16 October to hire Corover, a generative AI company, to build agents that can fetch government records on citizens’ behalf raises the stakes further, because it adds a new layer of automated access to a system that is still deciding who gets to open which door.
The government already has one official channel for data exchange: API Setu, launched by MeitY in 2020 as a marketplace for ministries, states and companies to exchange information through application programming interfaces, or APIs. The new committees may determine whether future AI agents use that system, or whether a different framework emerges to control how data is classified, published and accessed across government.
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