Excellence by Saikat Sir: NITI Aayog launches national data and analytics program

What is the news :

The NITI Aayog is planning to launch a National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) in May to provide government data in a user-friendly format, to promote data-driven decision making and research.
Conceived in 2020, the platform aims to standardise data across government sources and provide flexible analytics that make it easy for users to analyse information using multiple datasets.

About the portal

AIR correspondent quoting a Senior Adviser at NITI Aayog reports, the portal will help policymakers, academics and researchers to easily analyse data without having to process it.
The portal will have 200 datasets from more than 46 ministries at the time of the launch. New datasets will be added up to the village level in the future.
Presently, many government departments have public dashboards with options to download data, some are available as image files while others are in PDF format, making it difficult to compile information. Experts say this will be addressed in NDAP.

Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP):

Vision:

Democratize access to public Government data through a world-class user experience

Mission:

Standardize data across multiple Government sources, provide flexible analytics and make it easily accessible in formats conducive for research, innovation, policy making and public consumption.

Objectives :

User-centric- Data access is user-friendly and engaging, tailored to the needs of policymakers, bureaucrats, researchers, innovators, data scientists, journalists and citizens alike
Coherent – Multiple data sets are presented using a standardized schema, by using common geographical and temporal identifiers.
Up-to-date – Standard Operating Procedures are set to ensure data is updated regularly.

Overview :

India has rich publicly available data. Government departments have digitised various processes and reporting requirements, which in turn are feeding into management information systems and interactive dashboards.
This data is being used to track and visualise progress and make iterative improvements on the ground. However, the data landscape can improve.
All public government data should be easily accessible to all stakeholders in a user-friendly manner. Further, data across sectors should be coherent to support analysis and dissemination.
In addition, there should be easy access to the most recent data, published reliably

Challenges :

Data is not published in a user-centric manner.
The current data formats are often not conducive for research and innovation. Many departments maintain public dashboards with visualisations, and options to download data in analysable formats. However, some datasets are only available in PDF, webpage or as an image, making it difficult for further analysis. If this issue is resolved, researchers and data scientists will significantly save time and resources in cleaning and preparing government datasets for analysis Data ecosystem is incoherent due to different standards. Ministries and Departments do not use a shared standard for common indicators. Attributes like region and time period defined differently.
This makes it difficult for datasets to speak to each other and present a coherent picture. If we can solve this, many use-cases can emerge. For example, a District Magistrate can access data across all departments for their district, easily, in one platform.

Governance Structure:

High Powered Steering Committee :A high powered inter-ministerial steering committee under the chairmanship of Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog will be set up to provide direction, oversee progress, guide on data sources, and address various inter-ministerial issues on collating data.
Technical Advisory Group : A Technical Advisory Group consisting of sector and technology experts will be established to provide expert consultation. TAG will provide guidance on the development of the platform, management of data, and aligning the platform for user-needs.
Project Management Unit Established at NITI Aayog to coordinate with different stakeholders and manage various facets of NDAP.
Technology Vendor: A technology vendor will be engaged for development and operation of NDAP.

About NITI Aayog :

The NITI Aayog(National Institution for Transforming India) is a public policy think tank of the Government of India,.
The aim of the NITI Aayog is to achieve sustainable development goals with cooperative federalism by fostering the involvement of State Governments of India in the economic policy-making process using a bottom-up approach.
Founded on 1 January 2015
Chairman: Narendra Modi
Vice Chairman: Dr. Rajiv kumar

Excellence by Saikat Sir