Navigating in an uncertain, wobbly world requires constant monitoring of the path followed by the economy using real-time indicators. Thus, data can serve as the stones that enable one to cross the river.

• Concurrent with the data explosion of recent years, the marginal cost of data has declined exponentially while its marginal benefit to society has increased manifold.
• Therefore, society’s optimal consumption of data is higher than ever.
• While private sector does a good job of harnessing data where it is profitable, government intervention is needed in social sectors of the country where private investment in data remains inadequate.
• Governments already hold a rich repository of administrative, survey, institutional and transactions data about citizens, but these data are scattered across numerous government bodies.
• Utilizing the information embedded in these distinct datasets would inter alia enable government to enhance ease of living for citizens, enable truly evidence-based policy, improve targeting in welfare schemes, uncover unmet needs, integrate fragmented markets, bring greater accountability in public services, generate greater citizen participation in governance, etc.
• Given that sophisticated technologies already exist to protect privacy and share confidential information, governments can create data as a public good within the legal framework of data privacy.
• In the spirit of the Constitution of India, data should be “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Data is accumulated through digital footprints left by online activities with near-Zero cost. Marginal costs associated with Data can be seen as per the following;?

1. Better Targeting of welfare schemes: Targeting errors in welfare schemes, i.e., inclusion and exclusion error in beneficiary list can be avoided.
2. Helps in evidence-based policy framing.
3. Harnessing of data can lead to sharp increases in public welfare.
4. Accountability and better delivery in public services: By gathering and processing disparate datasets scattered across various ministries together.
5. Data has the potential to integrate markets by allowing seamless flow of information.
6. Also, can help in product innovation.

Drawbacks in collection of data

• A majority of the poor still have no digital footprint.
• The range of activities undertaken online is quite limited.

Why data to be treated as public good?       

• Private sector investment in data related venture is higher than ever before, as many earn revenue exclusively from people’s data. Ex- Facebook, Amazon, etc.
• But these investments on data harnessing is absent in several areas like agriculture, which could benefit the society.
• This is because the marginal benefit for private firm arising out of investments in social sector is not
• as high as society’s marginal benefit.
• So, Government must step into harvest socially optimum amount of data.
• Data linked to an individual can range from extremely intimate – such as their biometric details, to the extremely public – such as their name.
• Government intervention is required in social sectors of the economy, such as education and healthcare where private investment in data remains inadequate.
• Data carries of the characteristics of public goods. It is non-rivalrous, i.e., consumption by one individual does not reduce the quantum available for others.

Steps to be taken care of

While creating data as public good, government must ensure the following:

• Privacy implications and fairness of data being used must be considered.
• Government-driven data revolution is to be guided by three key characteristics for the synergistic benefits to accrue

1. Combining of disparate datasets to design and implement welfare policies.
2. Data needs to cover a critical mass of individuals/firms so that comparisons and correlations can be assessed among individuals/firms to generate useful policy insights.
3. Data must have a long enough time-series so that dynamic effects can be studied and employed for policymaking.

• Private sector may not have the risk appetite or the capital to make the necessary investments required for generating data that possesses all three characteristics.
• Data gathered by governments on issues of social interest should be democratised in the interest of social welfare.
• Open Government Data initiative taken by the Government is in line with this objective.

Open Government Data platform allows citizens to access a range of government data in machine-readable form in one place. The portal allows union ministries and departments to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use.

1. The Government of India collects four distinct sets of data about people – administrative, survey, institutional and transactions data
   • Administrative Data: Collected mainly for mainly non-statistical purposes and to evaluate welfare schemes.
   • Survey Data: Collected mainly for mainly statistical purposes. The identity of participants is irrelevant and unreported.
   • Institutional data: Data held by public institutions about people. Most such data are held locally, predominantly in paper-based form. This data can be digitized to enable aggregation at the regional or national level.
   • Transactions data: Data on an individual’s transactions such as those executed on the United Payment Interface (UPI) or BHIM Aadhaar Pay.
2. Data collection in India is highly decentralized.
3. The lack of a common identifier makes it difficult to consolidate information to analysis different units such as a citizen, villages, ministry, departments, etc.
4. Local Government Directory application developed by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj aims to address this issue.

Data Access Fiduciary Architecture  

To improve the efficacy in the usage of data held by different ministries/departments, Data Access Fiduciary Architecture is proposed. It works as follows:

• Each department of the government is responsible for making available the data they hold as a data provider.
• These departments must take care to appropriately treat private data and public data with the standards they require.
• This data is then made available through a Data Access Fiduciary to the Data Requestors.
• Data Requestors may be public or private institutions but can only access the data if they have appropriate user consent.
• The Data Access Fiduciary themselves have no visibility on the data due to end-to-end encryption.
• This model puts user consent in the centre of the government’s initiative to make Data a Public
• Good.

The integrated system’s efficacy relies on three critical features.

• While any ministry should be able to view the complete database, a given ministry can manipulate only those data fields for which it is responsible.
• Updating of data should happen in real time and in such a way that one ministry’s engagement with the database does not affect other ministries’ access.
• The database should be secure with absolutely no room for tampering.

Exhaustive information about every citizen with the government doesn’t endanger privacy, because:

• The Government doesn’t envision to gather any new information but seeks to make available all data within the government for citizens, government, private and public institutions to utilize the data.
• Such usage is also subject to user consent and appropriate privacy and fairness related constraints.
• People can always opt out of divulging data to the government, where possible, i.e., institutional, survey and transactions.

Transforming India’s Data Infrastructure

The Data Access Fiduciary Architecture requires robust data infrastructure. For that improvements on the following fronts is required:

• Digitize existing paper-based data. Digitize India initiative is in line with this objective.
• Initiate digital data collection at source.

• Initiate real-time storage or high frequency of logging data.
• Reduce time lag between collection and entry of data.

• Build capacities of government bodies to analyse data.
• Involve private sector in analysis and insight generation.

Open Government Data Portal is put in place. But to further ease the access of data by citizens,

• Scheme dashboards for major Government schemes must be created.
• The district-level dashboards instituted by state governments should be made functional, accessible and updated.
• Data on third party studies has to be opened to public for independent analysis of the findings.

A robust data backbone can empower every stakeholder in society.

• Governments can improve targeting in welfare schemes and subsidies by reducing both inclusion and exclusion errors.
• Generated data can be monetised to ease the pressure on government finances, by granting access to select databases for commercial use.
• The private sector also can reap massive dividends from the select data shared with them by the government.
• Citizens also stand to gain from such data revolution. Initiatives like DigiLocker for easy access and safe keeping of documents, NBFC-Account Aggregator enabling individual to access their own financial information across many data providers.

In the spirit of the Constitution of India, data should be recognized as “of the people, by the people, for the people”.