NITI Aayog portal developer OTSI to add more data sets

Object Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. (OTSI), which has developed NITI Aayog’s National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP), said it would onboard more data sets into the platform in the coming weeks.

The platform, developed with inputs from NITI Aayog, was unveiled last week.

It aims to standardise data across sources and provide flexible analytics that makes it easy for users to analyse information using multiple data sets, the firm said.

The portal will help citizens, policymakers, academics, researchers, institutions, international organisations to easily analyse data across the departments by merging various datasets without any hassles. 

It currently offers 203 datasets from more than 47 Central Government ministries and agencies and across 14 sectors. It will add new data sets up to the village level in the future. 

The data sets 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, the firm said.

For instance, Census, National Family Health Survey, Unified District Information System for Education data, are available on the portal. 

Today, 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 firm said.

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 NDAP platform with minimal manual intervention, it said.

“Using specially designed algorithms, the data fetched from various Government portals is processed to ensure uniformity in semantics so that two different data sets can be compared,” Chandra Talluri, Chief Executive Officer, OTSI said in a statement.

“This means that our software enables government data to be presented in a user-friendly format and promote data-driven decision making and research. As of today, we have analysed and processed more than 30,000 source files from various departments and combined them into 203 datasets on NDAP,” he said.

“We took every measure to make sure NDAP’s backend architecture is scalable and resilient to cater to the future needs of India,” he further said.