Information Impetus: Niti Aayog Plans Platform to Make Govt Data More Accessible to Public
The Niti Aayog reportedly intends to launch a National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) in May to deliver government data in a user-friendly manner, and to foster data-driven decision-making and research.
According to reports, Niti Aayog officials said on April 15 that the platform, which was conceived in 2020, aims to standardise data across government sources and provide flexible analytics to allow users to easily analyse facts and statistics using numerous datasets.
Anna Roy, a senior adviser at NITI Aayog, confirmed the launch of the portal in May, reports suggest.
“It will help policymakers, academics, researchers, etc, 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 and we will add new datasets up to the village level in the future,” Roy added.
It is worth noting that government data is currently not standardised, making it difficult to analyse for policymakers, scholars, and others.
According to a government document, the objectives behind NDAP are:
• Data access is user-friendly and engaging, tailored to the needs of policymakers, bureaucrats, researchers, innovators, data scientists, journalists and citizens alike.
• Multiple data sets are presented using a standardized schema, by using common geographical and temporal identifiers.
• Standard Operating Procedures are set to ensure data is updated regularly.
In the document, the Niti Aayog said: “Standardize data across multiple Government sources, provide flexible analytics and make it easily accessible in formats conducive for research, innovation, policymaking and public consumption.”
However, according to reports, a Niti Aayog official acquainted with NDAP said that while several government ministries have public dashboards with data download choices, some are provided as image files while others are in PDF format, making it harder to compile information.
It was also stated that the data collected by numerous government departments is incoherent due to varying standards for common indicators, which is another major difficulty.
This issue, according to Roy, has been addressed in the NDAP. She said that data fetched from numerous government portals is processed using specially built algorithms to achieve semantic homogeneity so that two separate datasets may be compared.
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