Launched in 2016, the Pune Municipal Corporation’s Open Data portal was meant to provide citizens with easy and reliable access to data collected by its various departments. However, except for a single upload in 2021, the site has seen no updates in the last six years. To add salt to injury, even the data that is up on the website is not accessible as the files are corrupted. “They have made a portal but are not updating it. This is a waste of money. The principle of RTI is that the data should be available and people should not have to file RTIs for everything,” Right to Information (RTI) activist Vivek Velankir said. The Open Data portal includes data sets like road statistics, school enrolment data, air pollution statistics, tree plantation numbers, birth and death rates, etc – data crucial to researchers, journalists and activists, and to citizens who want to know more about their neighbourhoods and city. The PMC website’s Open Data section describes why the portal was created. It says, “..a large quantum of government data remains inaccessible to citizens, civil society…(which) could be used by public for social, economic and developmental purposes…Opening of government data in open formats would enhance transparency and accountability while encouraging public engagement…Pune DataStore has been set up at to provide collated access to Resources (datasets/apps) under Departments published in open format. It also provides a search & discovery mechanism for instant access to desired datasets.” However, the portal falls completely short of achieving these praiseworthy goals. The latest data set available on the portal is ‘PMPML Yearly Information’ from August 2021. Data sets of most of the other 26 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 the web browser to show a ‘not secure’ warning while accessing it. Even the outdated data sets available on the websites cannot be used as the files are corrupted and do not open after downloading. Swapnil Mahajan, a consultant at the PMC’s IT department, admitted there was an issue. “Backend technology for the website is outdated. We are revamping the backend stack using React and Spring Boot. The work is ongoing and will end in a few months. The website will be completely changed and revamped,” he explained. Meanwhile, Rahul Jagtap, Chief Data Officer, PMC, had another explanation. “We have stopped updating data on this website and update it on the central government’s Smart City portal. The revamped Pune Open Data website will be ready in the next 3-4 months,” Jagtap told The Indian Express. Anjali Salar, an engineer at the PMC’s IT department, also said they have not been able to update data on the portal due to “technical difficulties”. “Once the new website is made we will be able to update the data. But newer data of Pune city is available on the central government’s Smart City portal,” Salar added. However, even the data on the smartcities.data.gov.in portal for Pune city has not been updated regularly. For example, ‘Education Data: Pune’ has only four data sets from 2021. Aditya Chawande, urban designer at NGO Parisar, highlighted how the lack of availability of Pune city data impacts citizens. “We worked on an Infant Toddler Caregiver Mobility Plan along with World Resources Institute for which we needed data on anganwadis, schools, hospitals, etc. This was in 2022-2023 but no data was available. We had to get special access from the PMC but that data was not mature enough. This shows the poor state of data collection in Pune. Even the data that is collected is not accessible for the common citizen,” Chawande said.
