India sets up Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics in New Delhi

Centre to provide data analytics services to the Government

The Indian Government has set up a Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) in New Delhi, a joint initiative of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and the National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI).

Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad inaugurates the Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) in New Delhi

The centre is intended to fast-track the adoption of advanced analytics in government, promote capacity building and enable the departments to self-service analytics with minimum technical support. It will help ministries in assessing impact from the analytics solutions and help in understanding changes to organizational roles and responsibilities.

In order to bring in analytics expertise CEDA proposes to establish strong partnerships with academia and industry.

CEDA will provide the following services to Government:-

1. Data Quality Assurance Services –. The centre will provide data profiling tools and techniques and necessary expertise to analyse the data for quality issues. While data cleaning shall be done for making the data ready for analytical use, recommendations shall also be given in order to help the department take necessary actions to further improve their data collection process.
2. Custom-built Data Analytics Solutions — Build analytic solutions that are specific to a particular problem which may relate to a single or a combination of departments.
3. Development of reusable assets — This will be one of the many USPs of the centre. CEDA will build Data Analytic solutions that address a generic data analytics problem that is prevalent across departments or States. Such a solution will then be made available to other departments/states as a pre-built analytic solution that can be operationalized for the new States at a cost effective and a much faster rate.
4. Knowledge Management — CEDA will implement knowledge repository to collect learnings from across projects and share best practices across initiatives and will ensure usage of best practices in across the government.
5. Capacity Building and Self Service Analytics — Besides creating the analytics solutions for the government departments, the centre’s focus would also be to train and enable the departments to do self-service analytics by simplifying the data in a manner in which an administrator can use it with minimum technical support.
6. Change Management — CEDA will help ministries in assessing impact from the analytics solutions and help in understanding changes to organizational roles and responsibilities

“The Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) has been created to support government departments to unlock the hidden potential of the data that they are generating as a part of the governance processes, and use it to improve the overall governance. It will provide world class data analytics services to the Government,” said a statement from the Ministry. “The shift towards the digital age, propelled by Digital India Program, has led to tremendous growth in data related to various aspects of Government functions and services. As the next logical step, government departments are now looking to exploit this mount of gold mine by investing in analytical solutions that can turn this data into insights.”

Speaking at the inauguration Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad said that today is the age of Data, according equal importance to information highways and national highways. “India has emerged as a big centre of data analytics and today the whole world is looking at us”, added Minister Prasad. Unveiling the potential that data analytics has in transforming the way the government schemes are run, he also released a white paper on ‘Data Analytics in Government’ which brings to the fore the need for a data driven decision making and policy formulation in Government.

Minister of State for Electronics & IT, S.S. Ahluwalia who was also present at the launch said that data analysis has been traditionally done since the time of Kautaliya for effective decision making, but today with great capabilities achieved in Information and communication technologies Data analysis can help in effective and efficient governance.

DigiVaarta Launched

The government also launched the DigiVaarta in Delhi with the intention of spreading awareness on DigiDhan, and to popularise BHIM’s barcode-based merchant payment mode.

This launch has two components –

1. An SMS application which operates from NIC’s SMS Gateway on a special Short-code service allotted for this purpose by DoT with the number “14444”. Citizens will receive SMS messages which are pre-approved by experts and the response messages will be made available for further action, analysis and research. The Government proposes initially to pay for the citizen’s response so as to promote citizen’s engagement and make the awareness program completely free for the citizen.
2. A Mobile application version of DigiVaarta, which can be accessed and used by smart phone users. This app can perform many more function beyond chat, offers audio-video tutorials etc.