Washington, June 12 (IANS) India and the United States have unveiled the Open Government Platform, a bilateral effort aimed at fostering transparency and enhanced citizen engagement by making government data, documents, tools and processes publicly available.

The event was part of the US-India joint commission meeting on science and technology Cooperation held here Monday.

India's Science, Technology and Earth Sciences Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Minister co-chaired

The Open Government Platform is a new kind of collaboration and it can benefit the entire world of communities through greater government transparency and better customer service for all our citizens, said Holdren.

It leverages out technological skills and our strong commitment to produce more transparent and open government.

OPGL is built on open source code and will be available to any government around the world, for free, officials said.

The launch marks a very important milestone in government collaboration and transparency, said Robert Blake, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia.

The two sides also pledged to step up their bilateral collaboration in the field of science and technology to boost innovation in key areas of clean energy, environment and high technology to spur economic growth.

Noting that bilateral relations in science and technology research and development have been strengthened, Deshmukh said there were several emerging new opportunities for India and the US on their common aspirations in these areas.

I am happy to report that the bilateral relations have increased measurably in the areas of maritime, agriculture and bio diversity, basic and applied sciences, advance telecommunications, energy and commercialisation of new technologies, Holdren said.

We find an emerging Indo-US eco system based on co-investment and co-development. Basic research has got a boost by expanding collaboration between the National Science Foundation and Department of Science and Technology in India, the Indian Ambassador to the US, Nirupama Rao, said.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)