The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs is making raw data from Indian cities available on a single platform for academics, researchers, and stakeholders to help data-driven policy making. The Amplifi 2.0 (Assessment and Monitoring Platform for Liveable, Inclusive and Future-ready urban India) portal was launched by the Ministry three weeks ago.
Currently, 258 urban local bodies (ULB) have been on-boarded, and data for 150 cities is available on the portal. “While onboarding the cities, we found that there is a lack of data maturity in cities, and thus only 150 ULBs were able to share their data. Following this, we sent data quality parameters to every city,” a senior official in the Urban Affairs Ministry said.
It is hoped that data from all 3,739 municipal corporations will eventually be made available on the portal.
The website provides data on a range of information for several cities, including, for example, the total diesel consumption; the number of samples tested for water quality; the average annual expenditure on healthcare; the total number of people residing in slums; the fatalities recorded due to road accidents.
Earlier, the Ministry used data provided by ULBs to rank cities based on four indices — the Ease of Living Index, Municipal Performance Index, Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework, and Data Maturity Assessment Framework. The government is also planning to bring out different reports on subsets of the four indices.
The Urban Outcomes Framework 2022, which has been developed for the Ministry by the National Institute of Urban Affairs and PwC India, shifts the focus from the indices to the data with a comprehensive list of indicators. With this, data across 14 sectors is streamlined to increase focus on data collection, and disaggregated data can be analysed by domain experts.
The initiative also provides the opportunity to create new frameworks based on open data. The 14 sectors are — demography, economy, education, energy, environment, finance, governance, health, housing, mobility, planning, safety and security, solid waste management, and water and sanitation.
India has been witnessing rapid urbanisation over the last few years. By 2030, India is projected to have 60 crore (40%) of the population living in urban areas compared with 37.7 crore (31%) in 2011. According to the 2011 Census, urban India contributed 63% to the country’s GDP, and this is projected to increase to 75% by 2030.
