Govt looks towards consultants for giving MeitY's InDEA 2.0 a push

InDEA 2.0 or India Digital Ecosystem Architecture was released by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in January 2022

It has been a year since the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released the second version of the India Digital Ecosystem Architecture (InDEA 2.0), a set of principles and architectural patterns aimed at enabling the development of large digital systems in India.

To promote its adoption across ministries and states, the government is now looking to hire consulting agencies that will prepare the architecture's blueprint, come up with a program plan, define key performance indicators, formulate a data governance strategy, and more.

The first version of InDEA was released by MeitY in 2018 as a set of architecture reference models designed for an integrated approach to e-Governance.

However, MeitY noted that the adoption of InDEA over the past two years across ministries had not been significant. "Despite efforts to create awareness among the ministries and states, the uptake of InDEA had not been substantial in two years," MeitY had stated earlier.

Consequently, the government modified and simplified the framework and introduced the InDEA 2.0 draft in January 2022.

"InDEA 2.0 is a framework that enables governments and private sector enterprises to design IT architectures that can extend beyond their organizational boundaries and provide holistic and integrated services to customers," MeitY had stated.

InDEA 2.0 especially focuses on developing digital identity-related solutions. "InDEA 2.0 proposes a model of federated digital identities that aims to optimize the number of digital identities a citizen needs to have," the InDEA 2.0 draft consultation paper said. The framework also concentrates on developing solutions in the assets and transactions ecosystem.

Now, the National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI) has floated a tender to empanel around four consulting agencies that can drive InDEA 2.0 forward and work under the Digital India program.

"NICSI intends to empanel a limited number of reputed agencies to work on the aspects of Technology and Program Management under Digital India/e-Kranti projects/Programs/Policies at the national level and to collaborate with ministries and states to develop their Enterprise Architecture based on the InDEA 2.0 framework," the tender read.

The consulting agencies will also be responsible for developing application integration architecture, defining a solution transition roadmap, and coordinating with the development team for its implementation.