NITI Aayog To Develop National Data & Analytics Platform With Private Players

The NITI Aayog is planning to develop the National Data and Analytics Platform by collaborating with private tech players, as revealed by a top government official to ET.

The platform will collect data from central ministries and state governments to aid more informed policymaking and become a single source of sectoral data for the stakeholders such as citizens, policymaker, and researchers.

This move has been materialised in conjunction with the government’s desire to determine the citizens’ data, patterns of the government spending, consumption trends and the success of various government policies.

“The platform is expected to meet the international security standards for safeguarding the privacy of individuals and entities,” an official at the Aayog added.

As such, the ministry of electronics and IT is already working through the Open Government Data Platform called data.gov. in, which is aiding the government in hosting hundreds of datasets. Although the platform is based on data, it does not have any analysis capabilities.

One crucial step towards developing such a platform is that NITI Aayog is planning to develop the NDAP by collaborating with private tech partners for its design, build, operate and transfer basis.

“This will significantly improve government decision making and quality of service delivery,” said Neel Ratan, Executive Director of PwC in a media statement. The estimated cost to develop the NDAP is said to be between $7.7 Mn (INR 50 Cr) to $15.4 Mn (INR 100 Cr) and the funding will be taken up by the NITI Aayog. To begin with, data from ministries will be sourced followed by data from state and districts. The NDAP data will be accessible to both the public and private entities.

The NITI Aayog will be using artificial intelligence to develop the platform. Many IT companies, such as the IBM, Wipro, TCS, and HP who have both the analytics and AI offerings are expected will aim for the collaboration.

NITI Aayog: Major Headlines Made In The Past Few Months

The Indian government’s premier think tank NITI Aayog is leaving no stone unturned to realise the PM Narendra Modi’s mission of making India truly digital by 2020 and raise India’s bar on the global startup ecosystem charts.

Among many other initiatives, NITI Aayog is taking further measures to boost the tech talent and prepare a proper roadmap for the players working on new age tech such as AI, ML, blockchain and more.

Here are a few major headlines about NITI AAyog which circled the Indian tech startup ecosystem in past few months.

• Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Union budget 2018 speech announced that NITI Aayog has geared itself to create a roadmap for National AI programme.
• Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has also stated that the government and the Niti Aayog are keen to promote entrepreneurial culture in India and committed at resolving the challenges faced by the startup community including that of angel tax.
• The think tank has already organised two international hackathons on artificial intelligence, and has also initiated a national case competition to explore the application of artificial intelligence in the field of agritech.
• The government body will be responsible for framing the policy on electric vehicles.
• It will reportedly be coming out with a discussion paper on blockchain technology.
• In the Union Budget 2018, the Indian government allocated $480 Mn to fifth generation technology startups like artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing and blockchain.
• Jaitley also announced that the government will be investing extensively in research, training and skill development in robotics, artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, Big Data intelligence and Quantum communications, among others.

The development brought forth by NITI Aayog is aligned with the Indian government’s ambition to digitise India on all forums. What can be expected from this move is that IT companies will try to have a bite of this share. What will be perhaps really interesting to watch will be if startups specialising in AI will pitch for this collaboration.