India to develop an API for entire government

India has released a “Policy on Open APIs for Government of India” (PDF) that calls on the nation's government to develop APIs to let departments share information with each other and with the public.

Many of India's government agencies are infamously moribund and Indians bemoan the short working hours, can't-do attitude and frequent corruption of “babus”, the derisory term used in India to describe civil servants. So disliked are babus that public opinion was very much in favour of a new biometric system introduced for the nation's civil servants in October. That the new system also offers a portal that reports on which civil servants have clocked on is also helping matters.

The API policy looks like an effort to further improve the operation of government and deliver a much-discussed “single-window concept to deliver the required electronic services by various Government organizations”. To that end, the policy explains its intention is to “Enable quick and transparent integration with other e-Governance applications and systems” and “Enable secure and reliable sharing of information and data across various e-Governance applications and systems.”

The wonderfully-named Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) gets the job of setting API standards, plus the chore of building and operating a messaging gateway to allow information transfer between government agencies.

Any APIs chosen by government agencies must be open and iterations must be shared, edicts that make this policy rather far-sighted.

There's no deadline in the policy, but “rapid and effective adoption” appears to be the watchword.

The policy calls for “all e-Governance applications and systems” to get an API, which means Babus are probably going to hate it even more once local coders get to work on services that expose just which government workers log on, and when. ®