The government’s public policy advisory body Niti Aayog is launching a digital cross-sectoral knowledge platform called Niti for States, which will create a digital public infrastructure (DPI) for policy and governance. It may also make the platform, likely to be launched on Thursday, artificial intelligence-enabled, official sources told ET.Niti for States will have a multi-sectoral live repository of 7,500 best practices, 5,000 policy documents, over 900 datasets, 1,400 data profiles of states, districts, blocks etc. broken down by demography and socioeconomic indicators, and 350 NITI publications.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering CollegeCourseWebsiteIIM KozhikodeIIMK Advanced Data Science For ManagersVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Professional Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitWhile the platform will be accessible online to all to help think-tanks, academia etc., the primary goal is to enable better policymaking as a ‘one stop shop’ for officials down to local levels to access robust, contextually relevant and actionable knowledge and insights for quality decision making.It will also have knowledge products spanning 10 sectors including agriculture, education, energy, health, livelihoods and skilling, manufacturing, MSME, tourism, urban, water resources and sanitation and hygiene, across two cross-cutting themes—gender and climate.The platform is integrated with Niti Aayog’s National Data Analytics Platform as the main data source.“Niti for States comes from a basic mandate of Niti Aayog, which is to foster cooperative federalism and aid good governance with a whole-of government approach… This requires interoperability of databases and real-time sharing of work, for which going digital is the only way,” an official said.Discover the stories of your interestBlockchain5 StoriesCyber-safety7 StoriesFintech9 StoriesE-comm9 StoriesML8 StoriesEdtech6 StoriesThe objective of the platform is to share data and best practices and enable cross-learning as part of Niti Aayog’s State Support Mission, and make decision making by bureaucracy more informed and efficient.“There is currently no DPI plug-in that is purely looking at creating and strengthening the spirit of cooperative federalism, which means creating a more nimble, agile, knowledgeable civil services sector,” the official said.The apex think-tank has an internal team developing and training AI for the platform on all the data, policies and best practices. “This will require several iterations as we cannot have even one wrong answer coming from the AI,” the official said.Around six states have been onboarded to access and engage with the platform already, and all have been approached to upload their data and best practices to populate the platform.Apart from the online portal, Niti Aayog will also launch a voice-enabled Viksit Bharat Strategy Room in its premises, which will in future have multilingual capabilities in 22 languages. The platform repository has been input in the room to enable rich data visualisation for immersive engagement with knowledge and insights for effective in-person discussions and decision making.The National eGovernance Division was the service provider for setting up the room.“The experience room aims to revolutionise policymaking by integrating data-driven insights, fostering collaboration, and enabling evidence-based governance. Through the convergence of cutting-edge technology, geospatial data and real-time monitoring, the experience room will empower policymakers to navigate complex challenges and steer the nation towards sustainable growth and development,” Saurav Bhaik, founder and CEO of tech-experiential company Tagbin, which provided the technology for the strategy room, told ET.The company’s speech-to-text and text-to-speech software, along with multilingual capabilities through the government’s Bhashini initiative, were used to make the centre voice-enabled, he added.The official said that states will ideally leverage the centrally-made software package to replicate the strategy room in their respective capitals going forward, with added tools and local contextualisation.Further, to take the software and experience to village or block levels, an ‘experience in a box’ version in a laptop with a projector is under development.The online portal will feature a separate login for civil servants to access personalised workspaces based on their role, with information on new developments in their respective sectors and focus areas. It will also be integrated with iGOT Karmayogi and prompt officials to take relevant Samarth capacity building modules.It will also have a Help Desk feature for officials. “We are engaging with government institutions, with experts, with retired and serving government officials to ask for questions that come from different officials on different topics,” the official said, in order to draft specific answers.
