by GIL Staff
India Policy Insights (IPI), the flagship project of the Geographic Insights Lab, has been designated as a Key Initiative of NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), the official policy design and innovation think tank for the Government for India. The mission of NITI Aayog is to develop and coordinate national development initiatives cooperatively across all states of India, including a “Monitoring and Evaluation” component that reviews program implementation and works to strengthen interventions by strategically identifying areas of critical need.
This new partnership will significantly help strengthen NITI’s monitoring capacity by providing a first ever online geo-visual data platform that synthesizes and visually analyzes policy indicators related to health, nutrition and population across all districts, Parliamentary Constituencies, Assembly Constituencies and villages of India. This comprehensive public dashboard will allow policy makers, elected officials, government administrators and other stakeholders to leverage
precision public health data to more accurately prioritize resources, make impactful adjustments to existing policy, and design more effective interventions going forward.
Commenting on the collaboration, the CEO of NITI Aayog, Mr. Amitabh Kant, says, “Our work with India Policy insights will expand our ability to visualize policy indicators at levels such as village or Assembly Constituencies, providing unprecedented depth and policy precision that will inform new thinking and localized strategies critical for India's public health targets and Sustainable Development Goals.”
NFHS Policy Tracker for Districts of India
Specific analysis tools for the forthcoming platform have already been released, including IPI's brand new NFHS Policy Tracker for Districts in India. Using data from India’s two most recent National Family Health Surveys (NFHS), the Policy Tracker provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface that allows users to quickly query and analyze data for more than 80 indicators across India’s states and districts, using either an All-India map view or customized scatter plot visualizations.
Insights gained from this unprecedented ability to quickly drill down into local indicator data over a 5-year period will help policy makers evaluate the efficacy of current public health initiatives, such as India’s Poshan Abhiyan (National Nutrition Mission), and will also inform better evidence-based policy dialogue and design of future targeted interventions, helping to direct India’s valuable and finite resources to the communities where the need is greatest.
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The full IPI platform deployment is slated for Spring/Summer 2022. We hope these tools will be immediately useful to a broad range of policy researchers working to understand and improve public health in India, and we welcome your comments and feedback.
India Policy Insights (IPI) is a collaborative initiative of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and the Center for Geographic Analysis at IQSS, NITI Aayog, and the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS).
The initiative is being led by S V Subramanian, PhD, Professor of Population Health and Geography, Harvard University, and Honorary Senior Fellow, NITI Aayog.
