GUJARAT, AHMEDABAD | 22nd NOVEMBER 2025 — NITI Aayog, in collaboration with Janaagraha, launched the City Data and Analytics Platform (CDAP), an integrated platform for urban data in India, on 20 November. A microsite on NITI Aayog’s National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP), CDAP aims to catalyse data-driven urban policy making in India.
The CDAP platform can be accessed here:https://www.citydata.org.in/
CDAP was launched by Anurag Jain, Chief Secretary, Government of Madhya Pradesh, during the inaugural session of NITI Aayog’s Data Forum 2025, held in Bhopal. The event began with an opening address byAnna Roy, Principal Economic Advisor and Programme Director, NITI Aayog. Srikanth Viswanathan, CEO, Janaagraha introduced the platform. Thomas Danielewitz, Senior Economist, World Bank, and Sanjay Kumar Shukla, Additional Chief Secretary (General Administration Department), Government of Madhya Pradesh were also present during the inauguration. Attendees also included senior state officials, central government representatives, academia, researchers, and international experts.
India’s urban population is expected to grow to over 800 million by 2050. The urban contribution to GDP, which currently stands at 63%, is also expected to rise to 75% by 2040. To realise the full potential of India’s cities and ensure quality of life for citizens, targeted reforms anchored in reliable, verified, and integrated datasets are essential.
Currently, data on cities is maintained in siloes across various departments, urban local governments, and parastatals.CDAP addresses this challenge by bringing together data from national, state, district, and city levels.Powered by government datasets, the platform enables cross-sectoral, spatial, and temporal data visualisation and analysis.
CDAP facilitates data-driven decision-making for urban development, and a place-based, holistic approach to urban planning and problem-solving that promotes transparency, accountability, inclusivity, and sustainability.
The vision for CDAP is for a steady and gradual increase in the depth and scale of information on the platform over time, enabling richer data at district, city, and ward levels. This willcreate a foundation for standardised urban data that drives evidence-based planning and decision-making.
Anand Iyer, Chief Policy and Insights Officer, Janaagraha, said: “CDAP will bring together data existing in different siloes, given the fragmented governance of our cities, toward common outcomes of quality of life. It is the use-cases that can be generated between several data-sets and located spatially that gives the true picture and enables useful decision-making.”
Neha Malhotra Singh, Leading CDAP at Janaagraha, said: “The City Data and Analytics Platform is a systemic solution that brings together credible, standardised, spatially and temporally comparable data that is truly place-based. The platform enables governments, researchers, and citizens to engage with urban data in a consistent and meaningful way, creating the foundation for more informed and effective decision-making across urban India.”
Anna Roy, Principal Economic Advisor and Program Director, NITI Aayog, said: “The National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) was designed to facilitate easy access to Indian government data and make it usable through search, merge, visualisation, and download features. The City Data and Analytics Platform builds on this foundation, bringing together standardised, spatially and temporally comparable urban datasets as a dedicated microsite within NDAP. By deepening the granularity of data and enabling a spatialised view critical for decision-making for India’s cities, CDAP advances NDAP’s vision of making public data truly accessible, insightful, and actionable for India’s development journey.”
CDAP is a microsite of NDAP and is conceived, created, and operated by Janaagraha with technical support from IBM through the IBM Impact Acceleratorand Social Bytes.
==========
