Supporting capacity building for the Government of India

Client: NITI
Governance, multi-sector
Dates of service:
September 2018 - present
IDinsight service:
Capacity Building
IDinsight contacts:
Divya Nair and Vishan Pattnaik
Learn more about:
Learn more about the AMAL Unit’s initiatives:
Agriculture | Data-on-Demand | Financial Inclusion | Health & Nutrition | Sanitation

The Problem

India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies, but its performance in key sectors such as Health, Education, Agriculture, and Financial Inclusion needs to be improved if its vision of inclusive growth is to be realized.

An essential requirement of this vision is to ensure that policy makers and policy implementers have the skills to collect, absorb, analyze, and use high-quality data to inform their decision-making.

NITI Aayog, the think tank/policy innovation arm of the Indian government, launched the Aspirational Districts Program (ADP) in January 2018. The program’s goal is to significantly improve socio-economic outcomes in 100 of India’s poorest districts in 5 years.

To accomplish this, district officials must be able to identify and implement interventions that are most effective, and constantly monitor progress towards program objectives. This requires the officials to demand, produce, and consume relevant evidence from the ground.

The Capacity Building team supports this process by working to enable policymakers and policy implementers in India to collect, absorb, analyze, and use high quality data to inform decision-making and monitor program performance.

Evidence Needs

IDinsight Service

The NITI Capacity Building team works on building capacity of government officials to collect and use high-quality data. This includes:

  1. Compiling and creating content on various topics that can be used to build capacity on using data. These topics include understanding different forms of evidence (including impact evaluations), collecting high-quality and decision-relevant data, and analyzing and visualizing data.

  2. Conducting workshops with various levels of government officials on skills that will enable them to use data more effectively for decision-making.


The project is ongoing.