India’s Conception of Community Data and Addressing Concerns for Access to Justice

This paper discusses the idea of community data that was introduced in the Non-Personal Data framework in India. Our interest is to engage with existing commentaries on the definitional challenges around who is a community, how it is constituted, who it represents, as well as propose a framework to be able to explore how to address concerns of access to justice. In our attempt to offer a model to operationalise community data, we argue that such community data includes three crucial aspects, that is, the identification of belonging with a community, the capacity to participate within a community, and finally opportunity to exit the community. Consequently, justice in terms of access to, and use of community data inherently includes an analysis of the individual’s standing in the community.