Union Communications and IT minister, Kapil Sibal today launched the Indo-US joint venture project, Open General Government Platform (OPGL) for making available Data from both countries. The project envisages openness, transparency and engaging of citizens in participative governance. Speaking on the ocassion, Mr. Sibal said, accessiblity to data would also facilitiate participation of individuals and communities for sharing innovative ideas and creative projects. He said, the OPGL is based on the National Data and Accessibility policy approved by the Cabinet for providing public acess to data owned by the government. He said it is also part of the outcome of discussions between Prime Minister Manmhan Singh and US president Barack Obama, during the US President's visit to India in November last year. The Advisor to Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure & Innovations Mr. Sam Pitroda was also present on the ocassion the launch of the OGPL.The Open Government Platform (OGPL) has been developed by the nodal agencies from both the countries National Informatics Centre, India and Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies of the U.S. Government can be assesd on the internet at www.opgl.gov.in. The OGPL Platform offers citizens to engage in their open data initiatives for better understanding of their needs, provides publicly available application programming interfaces and other tools to add external software modules for data visualization, wizards, and other purposes.