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NDAP's standardisation drive: Big shot at making govt data more accessible

While challenges do exist, the platform is focused on making official data contemporary with a constant mechanism of additions and updates

data policy
Subhomoy Bhattacharjee New Delhi
6 min read Last Updated : May 18 2022 | 9:13 PM IST
Health and more health data is what Indians are peering into at the National Data Analytics Platform (NDAP) released by Niti Aayog in May. Among the thousands of data sets, curiosity is high about the National Family Health Survey and the Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana.

For statisticians, the attention would be on the population census numbers and the civil registration system. The latter is garnering high eyeballs—like the death count during the Covid pandemic and a live register would be most useful at this stage

Overall, it is not surprising that after more than two years of pandemic fright, health concerns dominate almost anything the citizens have to do with the government. “Of course there could be a selection bias too,” says Vishan Pattnaik, Senior Manager, IDinsight. His company has worked with Niti Aayog to develop the platform. The Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana due to its nomenclature is the first item that a person might land up on at the site. "We shall have to wait a month or so before firming up our observations,” he said.

The NDAP is the most ambitious data standardisation exercise by the India government in recent years. Surrounding every major government action of the past few years, there has been debate about whether or not adequate data has been made available for the public to make an informed assessment. Even the new series of GDP data did not escape this debate. During demonetisation, data on plenty of issues relating to the government decision was in short supply. Later, in the GST framework, the absence of data on how much the central government was able to raise though the cess on fuels has been of major concern.

Aware of these challenges, appointed vice chairman of the Aayog, Suman Bery made a very important caveat while releasing the data. At a panel discussion with Chief Economic Adviser, V Ananta Nageswaran, he said the NDAP exercise will “democratise the use of government data”. 

The formal launch of NDAP was last week, though a beta version was running for more than a year. It hopes to  improve access and use of published Indian government data.

All central government ministries come up with data, and also use data to reach out to citizens. The Jan Dhan Yojana of the finance ministry uses data to track 440 million bank accounts just as the nation wide Integrated Child Development Programme uses data, to reach nutrition to those under five. 

It is, however, impossible to figure out if financial literacy for women has helped health outcomes of their children. Data from both ministries do not speak to each other. A major reason is that the base from which those data have been collected is diverse--some from village level studies, some from households. Some are available only at the level of districts and those boundaries are often changed. 

Under NDAP, this problem should become history because “the platform provides standardised datasets from across India’s vast landscape of administrative data” (NDAP website). 

A critical element to make the data compatible is the use of local government directory or LGD. The concept of LGD was fine-tuned by the ministry of panchayati raj as a complete directory of land regions/revenue, rural and urban local governments--in other words the basic administrative units. Nowadays, states or even the central government are most reluctant to change the LGD, instead superimposing the larger administrative regions on these units. But most data on NDAP was collected over the past decade when states, districts, villages, and towns looked different from what they look today. “This data must be transformed to match the LGD, which involves splitting and merging administrative units to match today’s units,” said Pattnaik. 

This is what the NDAP has set out to do. It has also succeeded. In May 2022, the NDAP hosted 203 datasets from across 14 sectors and 46 ministries in a machine readable format. “The rise of data and digital technologies is rapidly transforming economies and societies, with enormous implications for governments’ daily operations”, said Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Aayog at the release function of the exercise.

“Datasets on the platform are required to meet minimum data quality standards,” said Anna Roy, senior adviser in Niti Aayog, who has steered the project. NDAP has an in-house 5-star rating framework. Applying this minimum standard ensures that all datasets on NDAP are accompanied by detailed documentation and have been mapped to a common data scheme (the Local Government Directory). This means they have to pass an internal data quality check to ensure that they remain true to the source. “But we will continue to add and update the data on the platform to ensure that it remains useful,” she added. 

The next step is to ramp up the quality of the merger to make possible more granular analysis. While difficult, the larger challenge is also to make ministries and departments share their new data consistently, on the platform. 

Data coordination:

This was the problem which has hobbled data.gov.in, this government’s first open data platform. Several pages of the platform do not get updated. The alternative National Integrated Information Portal or NIIP being developed  by the ministry of statistics is still up in the air. 

This has happened even though there is a National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy since 2012, which specifically tells ministries to make data public. The idea was that so much data shall be loaded on the internet as part of this policy, “so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this (right to information) act to obtain information. It did not work. 

The authors of NDAP hope this time the demand from the public will make it difficult for the ministries to hoard data, which might often be useless to be kept out of the public eye. The use of the LGD framework is meant to cut across the inhospitable data standards that the ministries often deploy to keep their information, inaccessible. 

As of now, budget exercises by the states and the central governments use data that are either prepared by the Central Statistics Office, in the ministry of statistics or the Reserve Bank of India. Those agencies will take time to migrate to NDAP. 

For instance, E-way bills, the building block of GST data is up to date only for J&K. That for other states dates from FY19 and so is of use only for historical purposes. 

There are other glitches too. India and most countries are signatories to the Statistical Data Dissemination Standards of IMF. Those standards make it easy to compare two countries that, for instance, report their GDP. That they have measured the same set of activities within their national boundaries. 

The NDAP could offer its users a similar confidence level by offering a set of definitions of what are being measured. Central ministries and states often do not mean the same thing even on simple terms like school dropouts or access to electricity. 

Sample of NDAP

Population Census 2011
+ Land Use Statistics
+ Economic Census
+ Agriculture Census
+ Socio-Economic Caste

Census
+ NFHS-4 and 5
+ HMIS
+ MGNREGA
+ Handbook of India

Statistics
+ U-DISE


Topics :Data policyNiti AayogNational Data Repository

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