Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw launches NITI Aayog's digital public infra platform

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday launched government think tank NITI Aayog's platform 'NITI For States', a digital public infrastructure for policy and governance. Vaishnaw, the Minister of Communication, Railways and Electronics & IT, also inaugurated the 'Viksit Bharat Strategy Room' at NITI Aayog.

The 'Viksit Bharat Strategy Room' will enable visualization and engagement with insights, sharing of information and knowledge to enable effective in-person decision-making.

A multi-sectoral live repository of 7,500 best practices, 5,000 policy documents, over 900 datasets, 1,400 data profiles, and 350 NITI publications will be part of the new platform, according to an official statement.

The knowledge products on the platform span 10 sectors, including agriculture, education, energy, health, livelihoods and skilling, manufacturing, MSME, tourism, urban, water resources and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) across two cross-cutting themes -- gender and climate change.

The platform will equip government officials with robust, contextually relevant, and actionable knowledge and insights, thereby enhancing the quality of their decision-making, the statement said.

It will also support district collectors and block-level functionaries by giving them access to innovative best practices across various states and Union Territories, the statement added.

The 'Viksit Bharat Strategy Room' is an interactive space where users will be able to visualise data, trends, best practices and policies in an immersive environment and make a holistic assessment of any problem statement.

It also allows users to interact through voice-enabled AI, and connect to multiple stakeholders through video conferencing. It is designed to become a plug-and-play model to enable replication at state, district and block levels.

Various government organizations have collaborated in this initiative by NITI Aayog. It includes iGOT (Integrated Government Online Training) Karmayogi -- an online platform for skill training.

NITI Aayog's National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) has also been integrated with the platform to make various datasets accessible to policymakers.

National E-Governance Division (NeGD) has extended support to develop the Viksit Bharat Strategy Room while the multi-lingual support has been provided by Bhashini. PM Gatishakti BISAG-N team, with the support of DPIIT, has also been integrated for providing the geospatial tool for area-based planning.