Niti Aayog Reiterates Need For Economic Framework For Data Pooling

India needs to create an economic framework for data pooling as a business resource as India generates a huge amount of data, said Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant.

Speaking at the US-India Forum organised by FICCI, Kant announced, that Niti Aayog is currently working on a portal to “put this data in an anonymous manner in public domain” to allow people and business across sectors to utilise it.

He added that over 2K Indian startups are working with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools, and these cannot be starved of data.

“It is not possible for India to grow rapidly at high rates without a technological leapfrogging in many areas of growth. India has to get into sunrise areas of the industry, and I believe India can radically change the landscape of electric mobility,” he added.

He also emphasised that Indians are going to use data on a much larger scale as this is the only country with “varied bank of biometrics.” Therefore, he noted that the vast amount of data and critical data must be kept within the country, reiterating the need for data localisation.

“I am a great believer that the personalised critical human data definitely must be kept within the country,” Kant said.

Flashback To 2018

Kant had first spoken about the common data portal in May 2018 at a conclave on artificial intelligence organised by Bennett University as part of leadingIndia.ai. He noted that the move is aimed at steering startups towards innovation and finding solutions to sector-specific problems using AI.

The Niti Aayog CEO had also highlighted that government departments generally hesitate to share such data and that restricts the growth of technology. “Hence, we are trying to change that with the help of this portal. Startups can then leverage this data with the use of artificial intelligence to address India-specific issues,” he added.

NDAP To Bring Access To Govt Data

The announcement comes a month after Niti Aayog released a vision document for National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP), which would allow stakeholders and businesses to access government data in a democratic and open manner.

As per the vision document, “The NDAP shall be designed and operated such that it functions as a search engine for retrieving the data hosted on it. The retrieval and display of data shall be in accordance with good industry practices followed by other eminent websites operating in India and abroad.”

Moreover, the document also highlighted that the users will be able to search for content across sectors, indicator and location from text search to map-based search and datasets. In addition to this, the NDAP will also be enabled to optimise searches for the users, based on their search history on the platform and datasets they have accessed previously.

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