NITI Aayog lays out roadmap for enhancing data quality to prevent leakages, improve efficiency

NITI Aayog on Tuesday said fiscal leakage and erroneous or duplicate beneficiary records due to poor quality data drain budgets and inflate welfare outlays by an estimated 4-7%.

In the third edition of its quarterly insights series, Future Front, titled India’s Data Imperative: The Pivot Towards Quality, the Aayog has called for fixing ownership for data at all levels, ensuring interoperability of data and incentivising quality data rather than quantity to fortify digital governance, cultivate public trust, ensure efficient service delivery and reduce leakages in the system.

“Policy blind spots, inconsistent, non-standardised datasets distort evidence, leading to mis-targeted schemes or delayed course-corrections,” it said.


“Public trust erosion, citizens confronting mismatched records, rejected claims, or endless rectification queues lose confidence in digital governance,” it added.

According to the report, prepared by the Aayog in partnership with Gramener, the Aayog has outlined challenges in data use across the entire data value chain including storage, use, sharing and retirement of data.

“Quality suffers when data has no clear owner. The fix lies in assigning stewardship, not just for compliance, but for ongoing care,” it said, suggesting designating data custodians at each level (national, state, district) who are empowered and accountable for data health.

According to the report, most public programmes reward enrolments completed, forms submitted, and dashboards updated. “When speed is rewarded but accuracy is not, field staff may rush through data entry,” it said, adding data verification becomes a burden rather than a standard when outputs matter more than inputs.

“Interoperability, across platforms, departments, and time, is essential to making public data work harder and depends on shared schemas, reference codes, and APIs that allow secure and controlled access between programmes,” it added.

The report lays out three pathways to improve data quality in India. “Ensure real-time validation during data entry, conduct regular, sample-based data audits and use dashboards to track quality and not just outputs,” it said.

As per the report, India’s digital foundations are in place but the challenge now is ensuring that what flows through them is accurate, complete, and trusted.

“Collaborative mechanisms like voluntary scorecards, peer learning networks, flexible incentives, and playbooks of best practices that evolve with experience to ensure all our data is ready to serve,” it concluded.