Workshop on Meghalaya Data Portal conducted by ISB for Government Officials

Syllad | The Rising MeghalayaJune 10, 2024

The team of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP), Indian School of Business (ISB) is working closely with the state government of Meghalaya to offer capacity-building support to public policy leaders, government officials, private corporations, and the developmental sector, among other initiatives.

As part of the ongoing collaborations, the team of the Bharti Institute, with the support of the state Planning Department has developed the Meghalaya Data Portal (MDP), www.meghalayadataportal.com, an open-access data platform. The portal is useful to administrators, researchers, students, journalists, and the general public as a whole. This initiative of the Government of Meghalaya, in collaboration with ISB, will go a long way in developing the open data ecosystem in the country.

The team comprising of Dr Aarushi Jain, Policy Director; Deepti Soni, Associate Director and Amrita Chakraborty, Project Lead, India Data Portal and Meghalaya Data Portal, recently facilitated a workshop for more than 40 officers from across government departments on the navigation of the portal. The officers of the state can use the data to make various policy decisions based on data focusing on evidence-based policies.

The workshop was started by Dr Jain, who provided a background on the ISB’s India Data Portal and the development of the Meghalaya Data Portal. Ms Chakraborty conducted the data and insights-backed session, taking the attendees through a detailed walkthrough of the portal with several examples from across sectors like food and agriculture, education, health, nutrition, crime, rural development, socio-economic, financial inclusion, climate vulnerability, and infrastructure. This was followed by a Q&A session.

Sampath Kumar IAS, Principal Secretary and Resident Commissioner and Dr D Vijay Kumar, IAS, Commissioner and Secretary, Government of Meghalaya have been instrumental in the development of the Meghalaya Data Portal.

With the Meghalaya Data Portal, users get uninhibited access to free and reliable, value-added datasets. Some of the advantages of utilising MDP include that data in the public domain and from government sources will be free to use and interpret. MDP provides interoperability among datasets. For better insights and analysis, users can merge datasets using the local directory. Users can upload their datasets to visualize on the portal and users can download complete data.