Country should have data infrastructure

Chennai: The Economic Survey wants the government to put in place a data infrastructure to gather, store, process and dessiminate data. Government should view data as a public good and make the necessary investments within the framework of data privacy. Government’s mantra should be utilizing data “of the people, by the people, for the people”.

“In the endeavour to create data as a public good, it is very important to consider the privacy implications and inherent fairness of data being used. The processing of data will be in compliance with accepted privacy norms and the upcoming privacy law, currently tabled in Parliament,” the survey said.

While combining data sets will itself reap rewards, the benefit is limited if data is of an uncertain quality, not amenable to easy processing etc. Harnessing data consists of four steps – gathering, storing, processing and disseminating data, each of which offers room for improvement in India. Hence the country needs a data infrastructure.

In order to gather data, it has to be in digital format. Unless data is in a digital, machine readable format, its utility is limited. The recently launched Digitize India initiative is an ingenious solution to the tedious task of converting paper-based data into digital form.

As far as storage is concerned, public service delivery can benefit from real-time storage of data. With the widespread adoption of ICT approaches in public service delivery, real time data collection and storage is no longer an ambitious and distant dream but very much realisable, at least in select sectors and contexts.

Unleashing this potential of the deluge of data created when data is collected digitally, stored in real-time and utilised with existing data, requires skill. Governments at all administrative levels should invest in building their internal capacities to exploit data in real-time, perform analyses and translate data into meaningful information.