The Delhi government is working on a policy to strengthen data management across departments and ensure compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, passed in 2023 to regulate how organisations collect and use digital personal data, officials said on Thursday.
The State Data Governance Committee (SDGC) will serve as the apex policy body for data governance in the Delhi government. The chief secretary will chair it and will include senior secretaries from departments, including finance, planning, urban development, health and family welfare, and education. The policy proposes departmental data governance committees (DDGCs) headed by the respective heads of departments. Delhi’s Department of Information Technology (DoIT) will act as the nodal agency. The proposed policy is built around nine thematic pillars: governance and institutional framework, privacy and security, legal and regulatory compliance, secure interoperability and data sharing, data lifecycle management and classification, citizen rights and multilingual grievance redressal, annual data quality index and monitoring, capacity building and change management, and AI and emerging technology governance. The government has proposed a series of immediate implementation measures, including circulars directing departments to comply with the DPDP framework, appointment of nodal officers and committees, adoption of standard data-sharing protocols, standard operating procedures and a state data exchange architecture. The policy envisions periodic audits, compliance reviews, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, along with privacy-by-design principles.
Officials said it is aligned with the DPDP Act, 2023, the DPDP Rules, 2025, which operationalised it, and the advisories of the National Data Governance Committee.
The policy, described as a “compliance enabler”, seeks to establish a common framework for the collection, processing, sharing, protection and management of data at the Delhi government level. The committee is to meet every quarter, according to the proposal. These committees will be responsible for managing departmental datasets and implementing the state’s data governance framework, officials said. It will oversee operational components, including the state data exchange layer (SDEL), which allows data to be shared without duplication and the need for centralisation, the consent management system, state data catalogue and a central compliance dashboard, officials said.
