NITI Aayog is urging ministries to embrace technology to improve data quality and minimize human intervention. This directive aims to achieve a perfect score of 5 on the Data Governance Quality Index (DGQI). The focus is on building data pipelines that prevent duplication and ensure quality at the point of entry through technological verification.
This initiative comes at a time when India's digital transformation is rapidly advancing, with record highs in UPI transactions and Aadhaar authentications. NITI Aayog's recent report, "India's Data Imperative: The Pivot Towards Quality," highlights the critical need to shift focus from simply innovating digital infrastructure to ensuring the quality of data that underpins these platforms. The report warns that without this pivot, India risks eroding citizen trust and losing the efficiency and equity benefits offered by digital systems.
The report identifies systemic and performance deficiencies in India's public data ecosystem and proposes a pathway towards precision, trust, and accountability. It offers tools such as scorecards, diagnostic kits, and self-assessment kits to facilitate an institutional culture shift across ministries and departments.
Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog and Chief Architect of the Frontier Tech Hub, emphasized that even a single incorrect digit can disrupt essential services like pensions, healthcare, and subsidies, leading to fiscal leakage and erosion of public trust. She asserted that trust is the bedrock upon which digital ambitions stand and scale.
NITI Aayog's CEO, BVR Subrahmanyam, underscored that as India progresses in its digital transformation journey, data quality is not merely a technical concern but a foundational pillar of public trust and good governance. He stressed the importance of ensuring the quality of data being collected and used across government systems to strengthen policy outcomes, build public trust, and ensure efficient service delivery.
The "India's Data Imperative" report dissects challenges across the entire data value chain, from generation and storage to sharing, use, and retirement. It calls for a collective action, clear accountability, and a shared commitment from every department and ministry to improve data quality. The report introduces two practical tools to address these challenges: a Data-Quality Scorecard to assess and track critical data quality attributes, and a Data-Quality Maturity Framework, a self-assessment model to help organizations develop roadmaps to elevate their data management capabilities.
The recommendations in the report aim to embed a culture of data excellence, where quality is a shared responsibility, incentivized effectively, and supported by robust interoperability. The goal is to ensure that clean, usable data serves as the foundation of good governance, allowing the benefits of digital initiatives to reach every citizen with precision and equity.
NITI Aayog's push for technological solutions to enhance data quality reflects a growing recognition that accurate and reliable data is essential for effective governance, policy making, and public service delivery in the digital age.
