Launched in 2016, the Pune Municipal Corporation’s open data portal was aimed at providing citizens with easy and reliable access to data collected by its various departments. However, apart from a single upload in 2021, the site has not seen any updates in the past six years. To add salt to injury, the data on the website is also inaccessible as the files are corrupted.
“They have created a portal but are not updating it. This is a waste of money. The principle of RTI is that data should be available and people don’t have to file RTI for everything,” said Right to Information (RTI) activist Vivek Velankir.
The open data portal includes data sets such as road statistics, school enrollment data, air pollution statistics, tree planting numbers, birth and death rates, etc. – important data for researchers, journalists and activists, and citizens who want to know more about their neighbors. and the city.
The Open Data section of the PMC website explains why the portal was created. It states, “..large volumes of government data are not accessible to citizens, civil society … (which) people can use for social, economic and development purposes … opening government data in an open format will promote transparency and accountability. Public Engagement …has been installed in the Pune datastore http://opendata.punecorporation.org/ To provide collated access to resources (datasets/apps) under departments published in open format. It also provides a search and retrieval mechanism for instant access to desired datasets.
However, the portal falls completely short of achieving these laudable goals. The latest data set available on the portal is ‘PMPML Annual Notice’ from August 2021 onwards. The data sets of 26 other departments like Education, Civil Roads, Police, Heritage etc. have not been updated since 2017-2018.
The website also lacks an SSL protocol certificate (https), prompting a web browser to display a ‘not secure’ warning when accessed. Even old data sets available on websites cannot be used because the files get corrupted and cannot be opened after downloading.
Swapnil Mahajan, advisor to PMC’s IT department, admitted that there was a problem. “The backend technology for the website is outdated. We are revamping the backend stack using React and Spring Boot. The work is ongoing and will be completed in a few months. The website will be completely changed and revamped,” he said.
Meanwhile, PMC Chief Data Officer Rahul Jagtap gave another clarification. “We have stopped updating the data on this website and on the central government’s Smart City portal. The revamped Pune Open Data website will be ready in the next 3-4 months,” said Jagtap The Indian Express.
PMC’s IT department engineer Anjali Salar also said they were unable to update data on the portal due to “technical difficulties”. “Once the new website is up, we will be able to update the data. But the new data for Pune city is available on the central government’s Smart City portal,” added Salar.
However, even in statistics smartcities.data.gov.in Portal for Pune city is not updated regularly. For example, ‘Education Data: Pune’ has only four data sets from 2021 onwards.
Aditya Chavande, an urban designer from NGO Parisar, highlighted how the availability of Pune city data affects citizens. “We worked with the World Resources Institute on the Child Care Mobility Plan for which we needed data on anganwadis, schools, hospitals, etc. It was in 2022-2023 but no data was available. We had to get special access from the PMC but that The data was not mature enough. This shows the poor state of data collection in Pune. The data collected is not accessible to the common people,” said Chavande.
Why should you buy our membership?
You want to be the smartest in the room.
You want access to our award-winning journalism.
You don’t want to be confused and misinformed.
Choose your subscription package
Click here to join Express Pune Whatsapp Channel And get a curated list of our stories