NITI Aayog launches the National Data & Analytics Platform, makes data accessible to public

NITI Aayog has launched the National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) for open public use. It will host foundational datasets from various government agencies and provide tools for analytics and visualisation. A beta release was done last year in August, which provided access to a limited number of users for testing and feedback.

The apex think tank said the platform comes with a goal to democratise access to public government data. It wants to do so by making data accessible, interoperable, interactive and easily available on a platform. NDAP provides standardised datasets from across India's vast landscape of administrative data and helps users to search, merge, visualise and download datasets with ease, says the official website.

NDAP will follow a use-case based approach to ensure that the datasets hosted on the platform are curated to the needs of data users in different sectors - government, academia, journalism, civil society, and the private sector. All datasets are standardised to a common schema, making it easy to merge datasets and do cross-sectoral analysis.

Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, said, "The rise of data and digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies, with enormous implications for governments' daily operations. NDAP is a critical milestone – which aims to aid India's progress by promoting data-driven disclosure, decision making and ensuring availability of data connecting till the last mile, is an example of how the power of data can be leveraged.