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In 2010, erstwhile US President Barack Obama visited the first-ever expo on ‘Democracy and Open Government’ held at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. This was the time when then PM Manmohan Singh and President Obama came together to strengthen Indo-US bilateral ties, and discussed the formation of the open government data platform – data.gov.in – inspired by USA’s famous data.gov initiative.
As per the National Informatics Centre, Indian ministries, departments and their organisations are meant to use the web portal to publish datasets, documents, services, tools, and applications that they have gathered for public use. The platform, jointly developed by the two countries, aims to promote government transparency and create opportunities for a wider use of government data.
There are over 4.7k catalogues and 5.8 lakh datasets on the platform. The collection spans a variety of industries, including biotechnology, youth and sports, law, and science and technology. Additionally, one can opt to browse datasets based on where they are from; for example, one can select which central or state department or ministry they need a dataset from.
Future ahead: National Data Platform
Users of data.gov.in have observed that the website is either slow or falls behind in terms of data. The datasets available on the portal are outdated and not very useful. Now, to address the issues and make data-sharing more feasible, the government has decided to launch a new platform for the data geeks, i.e, the National Data Platform.
The proposed platform would be a full-featured data marketplace environment with built-in analytics, developer sandbox, visualisation engine, data tools, app/model development, modular metadata architecture, and adoption of various data-sharing policies. With cutting-edge AI ML-driven search & discovery, this will also handle the directories of all data available in India. As per data.gov.in, the platform will be a “one-stop solution to discover, harvest and register data from participating data exchanges and registries”.
In focus: National Data and Analytics Platform
The National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) is Niti Ayog’s primary effort to increase public data availability and utilisation. An easy-to-use web platform, NDAP collects and hosts datasets from all over India’s extensive statistical infrastructure.
The NDAP seeks to democratise data delivery by resolving many of the challenges that currently exist in the open data universe. The NDAP makes government data sets easily accessible and interoperable while reducing data loss. Available through a seamless user interface and easily visualised with interactive visualisations, NDAP resolves many of the data challenges faced by users.
On the portal, 601 datasets from 46 ministries are dispersed throughout 15 sectors. Users can access datasets such as the recent Central Electricity Authority (CEA) monthly power reports or the latest information on digital transactions, BHIM transactions, and debit cards, for instance.
Datasets uploaded to the platform must adhere to a minimal level of data quality as determined by NDAP’s own 5-star grading system. By conforming to this minimal standard, all datasets on NDAP are guaranteed to be supported by documentation, mapped to a common data schema (the local government directory), and have successfully passed internal data quality checks to ensure that they remain accurate representations of the original data.
Additionally, the ministry of Panchayati Raj local government directory code is used to map datasets on NDAP to a shared set of spatial and temporal identifiers. Users can combine datasets from several industries and sources in order to do quick cross-sectoral analysis.
As per Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Ayog, “The rise of data and digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies. This has 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 the last mile. This is an example of how the power of data can be leveraged.”
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