The workshop forms part of the groundwork for the national level deliberative summit on ‘Data for Development’, scheduled for April, which the ministry would be organizing as a follow up of the fifth national conference of chief secretaries of state and union territories held in December last year.
Addressing the gathering, S Krishnan, secretary, ministry of electronics and information technology, called for breaking data silos across government departments and expanding data access beyond centralised systems to state, district and field-level administrators. He noted that interoperability and responsible data sharing will strengthen evidence-based governance.
Saurabh Garg, secretary, ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI), urged states to organise workshops at state/district levels for wider consultations in the effort to institutionalise data-driven governance.
Institutional representatives and senior officers from states such as Karnataka, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan presented case studies on leveraging routine administrative data for generating policy insights.
“They highlighted common challenges in data reuse and integration, particularly issues related to data quality, and examined institutional architectures required to support data integration,” the ministry said in a statement.
The consultations aimed to build a roadmap for systematically harmonizing and linking administrative datasets across states and UTs, with defined timelines leading up to the April national summit. Debjani Ghosh, distinguished fellow at NITI Aayog, said that accessibility, interoperability, and trust in data are foundational to democratise intelligence and enable real-time decision-making at the grassroots. She added that the world is now entering the era of intelligence and the real power of intelligence is in democratisation.
Thomas Danielwitz, senior economist at the World Bank, described data as core infrastructure for the AI revolution, stressing the importance of integrating decentralised digital datasets. Seamless data integration, he said, can lower compliance burdens for citizens and businesses while delivering efficiency gains and cost savings.
The workshop also focused on operationalising purpose-specific data linkages following the legal and governance frameworks. Foundational building blocks required to create AI-ready, accessible ecosystems were discussed, with emphasis on uniform standards and making datasets linkable by design, the ministry said.