OTSI develops Niti Aayog’s National Data and Analytics Platform

Object Technology Solutions India (OTSI) has developed NITI Aayog’s ambitious National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP), which was launched last week. OTSI had been selected as technical partner to build the portal with inputs from NITI Aayog.

Envisioned in 2020, the platform aims to standardize data across sources and provide flexible analytics that makes it easy for users to analyze information using multiple datasets. The portal will help citizens, policymakers, academics, researchers, institutions, international organizations, etc. to easily analyze data across the departments by merging various datasets without any hassles. The portal currently offers 203 datasets from more than 47 Central Government Ministries and Agencies and across 14 Sectors and will add new datasets up to the village level in the future.

The datasets available on the portal have been selected based on use cases and after discussion with experts on the most commonly used data required for various analyses. For instance, Census, National Family Health Survey, Unified District Information System for Education data, etc. are available on the portal.

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. The analysis of data across departments is another key challenge. Data collected by various Government Departments is incoherent due to different standards for common indicators. This issue has been addressed in NDAP. The portal has also implemented an algorithm to track the changes in the data published within the websites of various departments and reprocess the newly available data into the NDAP platform with minimal manual intervention.

“Using specially designed algorithms, the data fetched from various Government portals is processed to ensure uniformity in semantics so that two different datasets can be compared. This means that our software enables government data to be presented in a user-friendly format, and promotes data-driven decision making and research. As of today, we have analyzed and processed more than 30,000 source files from various departments and combined them into 203 datasets on NDAP. We are working on getting more datasets to be onboarded onto the platform in the coming weeks. We took every measure to make sure NDAP’s backend architecture is scalable and resilient to cater to the future needs of India,” said Chandra Talluri, Chief Executive Officer, OTSI.