By Subhashish Bhadra Late last year, the Government-appointed committee on non-personal data released its second report. The first report, released in Sept ’20, had raised fears of ‘nationalisation of data’ and harming the commercial interests of data-based companies. The second report addresses several issues that were raised, and is a substantial improvement over the first. For a detailed comparison of the first and second report, you can read Ikigai Law’s summary. There’s much to like in this new report. First among them is the fact that it restricts itself to a narrow goal — of opening up non-personal data for public good purposes. It explicitly stays away from being a general non-personal data governance framework, which would have included direct government access to such data and B2B sharing of data (as was there in the first report). While not explicitly stated, this narrow goal also speaks to a market failure — that data has positive externality, i.e. it can benefit more people than just the one who collects it, but the collector has no way to monetise others’ benefits. Mandatory sharing of non-personal data is a credible way to solve it.