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The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)’s chief data officer Rahul Jagtap said last week that the city’s Open Data Portal will be updated and become functional by June 2025.
In December last year, The Indian Express had reported that the portal – http://opendata.punecorporation.org/ — meant to provide instant access to city-related datasets like roads, schools, fire department, etc — had been dysfunctional since 2018.
Jagtap and other officials had then said that the portal would be updated in the next three to four months.
The chief data officer has now told The Indian Express, “The portal will be functional by May 15 to June 1. We are in the process of data collection. We are currently also working on the new PMC website, and that is the first priority, which is why we have not been able to get the Open Data Portal back up yet.”
Jagtap said authorities indicated that all the datasets might be shifted to the National Smart City Portal at smartcities.data.gov.in. But as that has not happened, the city Open Data Portal will be updated, he said.
In December, The Indian Express found that datasets of almost all the 26 municipal departments had not been updated since 2017-18. Even the outdated datasets available on the website could not be used as the files were corrupted and did not open after downloading.
RTI activists and researchers had alleged that a lack of data was an issue in developing plans for the city.
