Free and open data enables not only increased usage of earth observation data but also opens the innovation gateway amongst the researchers. Such a policy direction proves to be most beneficial not only to researchers but also at the national and global levels as newer value added information products make their way into the market place, thus improving the ease of business too. The paper explores these aspects as part of a new policy direction taken up by India for making remote sensing data easily available for use both in the open domain as well as commercial data. The policy direction in both these domains proves to most interesting with India providing globally the best spatial resolution free data in the open domain at 5.8 m resolution.