Giving data its due: Creating a rich data ecosystem by National Data & Analytics Platform

Why in News?

• The article puts thrust upon the Government of India creating new roadmaps and enabling the development of a rich data ecosystem by National Data & Analytics Platform.

 

National Data & Analytics Platform (NDAP)

• About: It was launched in 2022 by NITI Aayog, in collaboration with different ministries and state governments, providing standardized datasets from across India’s vast landscape of administrative data.
  • It hosts foundational datasets from central and state government entities, presents them coherently in machine-readable formats, with a user-friendly interface and provides tools for analytics and visualization.
• Objective: The platform aims to democratize access to public government data by making data accessible, interoperable, interactive, and available on a user-friendly platform.
• Target users: NDAP’s target users include policymakers, civil servants, university students and researchers, journalists, innovators, and civil society groups.

 

Why There was a Need to Bring NDAP?

• Public data is often stored on platforms that are difficult to use and in formats that delay analysis.
  • Thus, data from different sources cannot be cross-linked., users cannot compare data from different departments or data gathered over time.
• Also, slow updating processes and inconsistencies in data quality, raises concerns if the appropriate data is publicly available.
• Also, the rise of data and digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies, with enormous implications for governments’ daily operations.
• Hence, every step of the NDAP design process addressed these challenges by including rigorous user testing to ensure that the platform precisely solves these issues.

 

Demonstration of How NDAP can Leverage Data to Strengthen Good Governance?

• For example, a state-level civil servant building new primary health centres (PHCs) for communities that lack existing health facilities needs to find and integrate three datasets from three different organisations as follows:
  • The health department’s Management Information System (MIS) for a list of communities with existing PHCs
  • The Economic Census from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to get a list of communities with private health facilities
  • The Population Census from the Registrar General of India (RGI) to prioritize villages based on size
• These separate datasets despite being all public, requires additional task of finding them and downloading data that takes time and requires knowledge of three separate portals.
  • This is followed by greater challenge of coherently linking the datasets to produce a single list of the largest communities without existing health centres.
• With NDAP, the decision-maker can access the data from all three sources seamlessly linked into a single dataset within no time.
• The data can then be downloaded and analysed using inbuilt analytics and visualization tools to better understand the data on the platform itself.

 

What is the significance of NDAP?

• NDAP uses cutting-edge methods to link diverse datasets from across the government and enables the use of several types of data at once.
• All datasets are standardized to a common schema, which makes it easy to merge datasets and do cross-sectoral analysis.
• NDAP by following a use-case based approach ensures that the datasets hosted on the platform are tailored to the needs of data users from government, academia, journalism, civil society, and the private sector.
  • Its users can create flexible tables and visualizations for easy exploratory analysis using the platform’s in-built analysis tools.
• NDAP is quality benchmarked as datasets on the platform are required to meet a minimum data quality standard that is defined using NDAP’s in-house 5-star rating framework.
• NDAP can save considerable time of the civil servants and make their decisions more data-driven, resulting better governance and programme outcomes for the common public.
• Its public access has provided opportunities for all, including states, ministries, and India’s data community, to support NDAP by helping improve, expand and update the platform’s existing datasets and capabilities.
• NDAP has also been made an integral part of the State Support Mission of NITI Aayog and the development of state-specific portals on the lines of NDAP helps in cost and time saving ensuring all states become equal partners in data-driven governance.

 

Conclusion

• A coherent data ecosystem includes a strategy and a set of tools to process, manage and use data. At the scale of the Government of India, improvements to the data ecosystem by NDAP can thus have profound positive impacts.
• Also, developed in the spirit of cooperative federalism, NDAP strives to maintain the principles of collaboration across the board, ensuring that all states are equal partners in the journey of becoming champions of data-driven policymaking.

 

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Q1) What is National Economic Census?

Ans) It is the census of the Indian economy, counting all entrepreneurial units in the country which are involved in any economic activities of either agricultural or non-agricultural sector.

 

Q2) What is the role of Registrar General of India (RGI)

Ans) RGI, Ministry of Home Affairs, is engaged with the task of arranging, conducting and analysing the results of the demographic surveys of India including Census of India and Linguistic Survey of India.

 

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Source: The Indian Express

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-UTjMLYRM&t=1s