Niti Aayog plans data and analytics platform

NEW DELHI: 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, officials of the think-tank said on Friday. 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, they said.

Anna Roy, a senior adviser at NITI Aayog, said, “We will launch the portal in May. 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.” Currently, government data is not standardised, making it difficult for policymakers, researchers, etc. to analyse.

A Niti Aayog official familiar with NDAP said that while 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.

Analysis is another key challenge, the official said, adding that data collected by various government departments is incoherent due to different standards for common indicators. Roy said this issue has been addressed in NDAP. “Using specially designed algorithms, the data fetched from various government portals is processed to ensure uniformity in semantics,” she added.