India will set new data standards in G20 stint

In the dense forests of Maharashtra, a novel data collection tool is changing the lives of children with malnutrition. Gadchiroli is an aspirational district with some of the highest rates of malnutrition in the country. However, in the last few years, the Integrated Child Development Services have been able to contain and bring down malnutrition rates with the help of the Poshan Tracker application. Developed by the National eGovernance Division, the app helps record real-time data about the vital statistics of newborns, children up to the age of six, and adolescent girls, and is available in 22 languages. This has improved the delivery of nutritional interventions to malnourished children and pregnant and lactating mothers. In Gadchiroli, the data collected through the app helped the administration design and curate a hyperlocal special diet to tackle malnutrition, and this intervention proved successful.

Five years ago, The Economist declared that data and not oil, is the world’s most valuable resource. A slew of analyses, interpretations and projections followed. This month, former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Nicholas Clegg, made headlines with his statement that data isn’t finite and limited like oil, rather, it is like air, which can’t be contained. Many industrialists now hail data as the raw material. Data forms the bedrock on which today’s knowledge pyramid rises towards awareness, understanding and finally, wisdom, which is essential for nuanced and effective policymaking. For this wisdom to be democratically accessible, affordable, and available for nation-states across the world, the G20 presidency of India will be pivotal.

The World Development Report 2021 asserts that there is a need for forging a new social contract for data which accelerates data use and reuse to realise greater value, creates equitable access to benefits, integrates national data systems, and finally fosters trust such that people are protected from the harms of data misuse. We must construct new rules for this data age, and the road ahead signals some critical but surmountable challenges. For instance, less than 20% of low- and middle-income countries have modern data infrastructures such as colocation data centres and direct access to cloud computing facilities. In India, public data remains inaccessible because many government officers don’t want to put data out in the public domain. Data is also siloed across sectors.

As we enter India’s techade, data must be accessible to all citizens. We must adopt a multisectoral approach to collecting, integrating and interpreting data. This will strengthen service delivery by governments at all levels. Data should be presented in a simplified and decluttered manner to maximise the benefits. Just like the example of Gadchiroli, real-time data collection has helped transform all 112 aspirational districts in three-and-a-half years. This would otherwise have taken six decades in the absence of monitoring development indicators.

When it comes to data governance, India offers a range of best practices. which can be emulated and advanced by other nations. For any government, clear and nuanced visibility of the data when it comes to outlays (expenditure undertaken by the government), outputs (what’s bought with this expenditure), and outcomes (goals that these outputs achieved) is substantially important. In this context, NITI Aayog has prepared the Data Governance Quality Index (DGQI). This index enables government agencies to undertake a detailed self-assessment of their data-preparedness levels. It helps ministries advance towards an optimal data-driven outcome tracking, and data governance architecture. Clarity on the outlays-output-outcome triad has been aiding ministries to bolster existing schemes and introduce specific policy interventions, which have the potential to address any gaps in the way of realising developmental goals. There is a huge amount of data churned from multiple sources, and every organisation should be able to assess whether it is making the most of this available data or not.

Even as terabytes of data flow through the government’s data pipeline involving collection, cleaning, processing, analysis, modelling and visualisation, the pipeline is constrained with structural plaque. This plaque comes from databases being inaccessible and siloed, and data platforms being cluttered with complexity without any flexibility to innovate. To address these issues, NITI Aayog has built a transformational open data platform called the National Data Analytics Platform (NDAP). This platform provides a framework via which datasets are converted from PDFs into machine-readable formats, standardised into a common schema, given the optionality to merge and interoperate across datasets, which is a very efficient tool for users. NDAP makes government datasets accessible, interoperable and interactive. I firmly believe that developing nations need to tap into the power of data for development to leapfrog into an era of progress. Today, the comprehensive mining and evaluation of data are driving some of India’s leading policy-making success stories — from Poshan Abhiyaan to the Aspirational Districts Programme — and is poised to deliver much more. India’s G20 Presidency is an opportune time to set a new gold standard for data. A gold standard which emphasises nations to invest in self-evaluation of their data governance architecture, calls for modernisation of national data systems to incorporate citizen voice and preferences regularly, advances principles of transparency for data governance and finally brings to the forefront the need for strategic leadership on data for sustainable development.

Amitabh Kant is India’s G20 sherpa and ex-CEO, NITI Aayog The views expressed are personal