Hon’ble Union Minister of Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad launched the Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) on 28th September, 2018 at a vibrant function held at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. The ceremony was presided over by Shri S.S. Ahluwalia, Hon’ble Minister of State (E&IT), Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary (MeitY), Shri Pankaj Kumar, Additional Secretary (MeitY), Dr. Neeta Verma, Director General (NIC) Shri MK Mishra, Managing Director (NICSI) and several dignitaries from the government, industry and academia. A workshop on Data Analytics in Government was also held following the inaugural function.
National Informatics Centre (NIC), as a premier ICT solution provider to the government at all levels, has always taken key steps to introduce the latest technologies and services in the government. National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI) is an enterprise under NIC and has supported NIC’s initiatives through provisioning of resources, and establishing & managing ICT infrastructure. Recognising the emerging digital ecosystem and the challenges, and opportunities it offers to Government as a whole, NIC and NICSI have jointly set up CEDA to support government departments to unlock the hidden potential of the data that they are generating as part of governance processes and use it to improve overall governance.
GENESIS OF CEDA Rapid digitization of various government functions and services under the government of India’s flagship Digital India programme has led to a swift upsurge in the creation of data. Data analytics and its potential integration with policy making can act as major drivers of improved governance. Data Analytics technologies present a compelling opportunity to bring data from across department silos to get a more comprehensive picture of the development goals of the government. Just as scores of governmental and corporate bodies have reaped the benefits of effective data analytics all over the globe, the Government of India Departments could provide better and more meaningful governance if they have an efficient data analytics system in place. This will help improve quality of service, planning and monitoring, and various other aspects of governance.
SCOPE CEDA will provide data analytics services to the government and help in solving complex policy issues through data-driven decision making so as to ensure an effective formulation and implementation of various development initiatives that will ultimately benefit the citizens. CEDA proposes to establish strong partnerships with academia and industry to ensure that the cutting-edge technologies and quality expertise are brought in to help the government take advantage of the booming analytics wave. The centre also proposes to build tools and technologies, in collaboration with academia and industry, to provide quality tools at a much lower cost to the government. CEDA will offer following services to the government:
Data Quality Assurance Services The Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics 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 processes.
Custom-built Solutions Build data analytic solutions, specific to a particular problem relating to one or more departments.
Develop reusable assets Build Data Analytic solutions that address generic data analytics problems prevalent across departments or states. Such solutions will then be made available to other departments/ states as pre-built analytic solutions that can be operationalized at a cost effective and faster rate.
Knowledge Management CEDA will implement a knowledge repository to collect learnings from across projects and share best practices across initiatives. It will enable the usage of best practices across the government.
Capacity Building & Self Service Analytics CEDA will 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.
Change Management CEDA will help ministries and departments in assessing impact from the analytics solutions and support in understanding changes to organisational roles and responsibilities.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS Launch of DigiVAARTA App DigiVAARTA App was launched to accelerate the access and enable financial and social inclusion by familiarizing the citizens on various schemes and programmes. Also featured in the App are chats, audio-video tutorials etc. DigiVAARTA App would also spread the awareness on DigiDhan, BHIM’s barcode-based merchant payment mode with merchants and traders at large.
Workshop on Data Analytics The second part of the event was a workshop on Data Analytics in Government. The workshop was actively attended by participants from the government, industry and academia. The workshop panelists included Shri DC Misra, DDG (NIC), Shri PK Bhardwaj, IPS, Shri SK Mathur, IPS, Shri Gopalakrishnan, IAS (MeitY), Shri BN Shetty, CTO (MHA) and Shri Neel Ratan (PWC-Asia).