Union Minister of Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad inaugurated Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) in New Delhi last week. The CEDA has been set up to aid in fast-tracking the adoption of advanced analytics in government.

Speaking at the inauguration, Prasad reinforced that the information highways were just as important as the national highways. “India has emerged as a big centre of data analytics and today the whole world is looking at us,” he added, according to the official statement released by the Union Ministry of Electronics and IT. He also released a white paper titled Data Analytics in Government which brings to the fore the need for a data-driven decision making and policy formulation in Government across the entire spectrum of its activities.

Launched Center of Excellence on Data Analytics set up by NIC. This will boost data analytics across Government departments and lead to effective use of data for improving governance. #DigitalIndia pic.twitter.com/ARJ3LnMop4

— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) September 28, 2018

The National Informatics Centre (NIC), in a joint initiative with National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI), has set up CEDA. According to the ministry’s official statement, the CEDA will fulfil the following objectives:

• Be a focal point and centre of expertise in data analytics for government and public sector
• Help ministries in assessing the impact from the analytics solutions and help in understanding changes to organisational roles and responsibilities
• Facilitate faster and cost-effective technology adoption
• Promote capacity building and enable the departments to self-service analytics with minimum technical support
• Implement knowledge repository to collect learnings from across projects and share best practices across initiatives to ensure adoption of best practices

I urge all the Government Departments and state governments to make the best use of CoE on #DataAnalytics of NIC for improving their overall understanding, usage and upkeep of data. Along with innovation, data dignity and privacy is equally important. #DigitalIndia pic.twitter.com/x1SWS0PoYR

— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) September 28, 2018

The CEDA also aims at providing the following services:

1. Data Quality Assurance Services: The centre will provide data profiling tools and techniques and the 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. Develop 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 operationalised 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 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 the impact from the analytics solutions and help in understanding changes to organisational roles and responsibilities

Prasad, who has been championing the use of artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine communication in sectors like healthcare and education, had visited Google headquarters last month to discuss the role of technology in empowering Indian users. He had also said that India had the world’s third-largest startup community after the US and the UK and that his ministry was working in mission mode to make India’s digital sector stronger.

Through a series of events and speeches from earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seen to have been deliberately showcasing India as well as his government as technologically forward. Industry insiders are happy to see that the Modi-led NDA government is working towards supporting a tech-driven future.