Union IT Minister inaugurates Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics

In the era of rapid digitization of various government functions and services under Government of India’s flagship Digital India program, the center aims to strengthen citizen service delivery through data-driven governance.

Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Sh. Ravi Shankar Prasad today inaugurated Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) in New Delhi. The technology backbone of the government – the National Informatics Centre (NIC), in a joint initiative with National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI) has set up CEDA.

Speaking at the inauguration the IT Minister said that today is the age of Data, and Data is power and information highway is equally important as national highways. "India has emerged as a big center of data analytics and today the whole world is looking at us", added Sh. Prasad. Unveiling the potential that data analytics has in transforming the way the government schemes are run, Sh. Prasad 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 across the entire spectrum of its activities.

Minister of State for Electronics & IT Sh. 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.

Centre of Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) will aid in fast-tracking the adoption of advanced analytics in government. In the era of rapid digitization of various government functions and services under Government of India's flagship Digital India program, the center aims to strengthen citizen service delivery through data-driven governance. 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. Through its service offerings, CEDA aims to:

• Be a focal point and center 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 organizational 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

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.

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 analytic wave. Through its focused efforts, the center aims to provide data analytics services to the government and help in solving complex policy issues through data-driven decision making to ensure effective formulation and implementation of various development initiatives that will ultimately benefit the citizens.

(With inputs from PIB)