The Need for Open Data Initiatives in India

Data powers most of the decisions in the corporate world today, from how much of investment is to be put in to develop a TV show, to what new kind of chocolates an FMCG company should launch.

But when it comes to the public sector, the use of data remains tremendously limited. Multiple studies, including those by organizations like the World Bank, have shown how increased access to public data leads to transparency and accountability of Governments, and promotes better quality research. However, most of our public data, which consists of huge amounts of socio-economic data, data about PSUs, different government schemes etc. stays in silos with different formats and terminologies, and they often suffer from a number of data quality issues.

The data quality issues crop up due to multiple reasons. There are problems to fix right at the data entry level. To cite an example, several state governments have made a focus on data-driven development in education. But the computer operators hired often lack training. Hence, the onus of data entry falls on the already overburdened teachers, who hardly have the motivation to pay attention to this work.

And then there are the technological mess-ups. A friend tells me how she found out the date column was being fed into the number of malarial deaths column in a public health data system, which led to the recording of 1 lakh+ deaths out of malaria in a single block.

Sometimes, even when the data is correct, the difficulty comes in contextualizing it. While conducting a study on the socio-economic impact of rural electrification, I found out from the Saubhagya dashboard that in Uttar Pradesh, Rampur district had gotten one of the highest number of new electricity connections. But a field visit showed that a very big proportion of the beneficiaries had just shifted from illegal connections to legal ones, and thus the dashboard painted only half the picture.

Another challenge that remains is of granularity and data privacy. For good quality research, researchers often need the granularity of the data to be up to the level of individuals. But since anonymization of public data has never been a Government priority, the privacy of individuals may be compromised if others have unbridled access to it.

Also, most of this data is from the Centre, and very few states have contributed to the open data efforts.

All this said, we have to realize that our public data systems were designed much before the true power of data had been discovered, and like in any developing country with its host of challenges, our Governments have not been able to prioritize the revamping our data architecture. In this background, the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) was a very welcome step.

Now we need civil society organizations in India to take up “data activism” to ensure that people have access to good quality usable data. Journalists, researchers, and even for-profits need to use this data to give useful insights about our developmental challenges. Only then will we be able to bring about a cultural change in the decision-making processes in our country, which till day is based on the political motives and gut feelings of politicians and bureaucrats, and make it more data-backed.

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