National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP)

National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP)

News: National Data and Analytics Platform enables policy-makers and researchers to exploit the potential of government data.

What is NDAP?
 NDAP is a transformational open data platform launched by NITI Aayog in 2022.
 It provides foundational datasets from central and state government entities in machine-readable formats, with a user-friendly interface and powerful analytics.
 The platform uses cutting-edge methods to link diverse datasets from across the government and enables the use of several types of data at once.
 NDAP’s target users include policymakers, civil servants, university students and researchers, journalists, innovators, and civil society groups.
 The design process of NDAP was preceded by extensive research with diverse data users to learn about their demand for government data, and challenges faced in doing so.

What is the need for NDAP?
 Collecting and storing data is just the first step in realising its potential.
 A coherent data ecosystem that is, a strategy and a set of tools to process, manage and use data is essential. At the scale of the Government of India, improvements to the data ecosystem can have profound positive impacts.
 Public data is often stored on platforms that are difficult to use. It is available in formats that delay analysis. Data from different sources do not speak to each other. Users cannot compare data from different departments or data gathered over time.
 There are issues related to slow updating processes and inconsistencies in data quality. It is not always clear that the appropriate data is publicly available.

What are benefits of NDAP?
 A Civil servant who wants to build a new primary health centre (PHC) where state lacks health facilities needs to go across 3 different departments, collect and receive data and it is time consuming process. It is unnecessary because there exists technology to link all data sets on a single portal.
 However, with NDAP, in a matter of minutes, the decision-maker can access the data from all three sources seamlessly linked into a single dataset. She can then download the data and analyse it using her preferred method or use inbuilt analytics and visualisation tools to better understand the data on the platform itself.
 It will help make Data driven decisions.
 The people of the state can enjoy better governance and programme outcomes.
 The Prime Minister has often exhorted the adoption of evidence-based policy-making and implementation. The NDAP in collaboration with states can turn this into reality.
 Training on NDAP has been included in the curriculum of officer trainees at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie. This will enable incoming government officers to develop a data-driven decision-making mindset from their first field job.

Conclusion
 NDAP will promote co-operative federalism, improve governance and the open data platform can play a vital role in facilitating Data-Driven governance.