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M Rajivlochan
Member, State Higher Education Council, Chandigarh
The current squabble about India’s GDP figures comes with a warning from economist Arvind Subramanian: don’t trust statisticians with statistics, have people from other disciplines keep an eye on them. We would suggest that the best outcome would happen when even the common public and businesses are allowed free access to data that is currently available with the government. Economists and statisticians can figure out how to collect data; businesses, researchers and the common public can use that data to generate value for society, create better strategies for whatever work they are doing. Because, these are the people who, in the normal course of existence, have no access to large data-sets which in India is available only with the government and these are the ones who add lasting value to society.
The government is currently sitting on a knowledge goldmine that is hidden in its haphazardly stored data. Yet, data can be used not only for grand things like planning public policy, social justice and promoting equity and secularism, but also for businesses and researchers as well. For example, today we are familiar with the small pack/sachet that dominates the retail FMCG sector in India. What we forget is that the small retail pack emerged out of a unique piece of research that a vice-president of the Indian Tobacco Company did a few decades ago using the decennial population Census data to recognise the youthfulness of population and its lack of wealth. Therefrom, he devised the concept of a small retail pack for a brand of cigarette. The concept of the small retail pack took the company to unexplored markets and brought huge profits.
Two decades ago, the University of East Anglia was asked by the European Union to figure out the profits generated by ‘public sector information’. What it found was astounding. The US government spent about 19 billion per year on collecting and maintaining population and land data about America, Americans and anyone who came in contact with them. Most of this data was shared with users for free. The commercial turnover generated through the use of this data was approximately 750 billion euro in the US alone. The data was used by private companies to conduct their own business researches, for GIS mapping and much more. At the same time, European governments spent€9.5 billion euro per year in collecting and maintaining data and then charged commercial enterprises for its use. This translated into a turnover of about€68 billion euro per year from the various uses to which businesses put this data in the EU.
The Indian Government at the same time did not spend much money in collecting and maintaining data; what little it did was done haphazardly, with every data manager and policy maker busy reinventing the wheel and no two bits of data ever being able to talk to each other. This resulted in ensuring that Indian data was some of the most difficult to access, process and use. Shorn of data, the government, Indian businesses, Indian researchers and, even curious Indians, made decisions — policy decisions as well — based on hunches, intuition, and worse, personal whims.
A tool to get governments at different levels to dust off the data and get it out of record rooms could be to allocate 1% of all budgets to programme evaluation and monitoring. After all, if Rs 99 out of Rs 100 is used for implementation, surely Re 1 could be used for evaluating whether the money spent actually achieved anything. Different departments within the government could cross-verify one another as an external check; 10% of the data could always be validated by third parties. Colleges and universities would be happy to do the task. One advantage of using knowledge institutions for such tasks is that they add data to the public domain, so shared knowledge resources get bumped up.
While these knowledge resources vary in each sector, broadly three kinds of data can be found in most government offices: (1) data about households, classes of income and expenditure; in case of farmers, some specific inputs that they purchase are also recorded to the extent that these are subsidised by the government; (2) data about skill-sets among the working population; and (3) data about productivity. All three kinds of data are important. Government departments routinely acquire a lot of data merely on account of the nature of their tasks. For instance, transport departments collect information about vehicles and drivers’ licences. The railways have information about freight costs by rail. Electronic way bills have information about freight rates for road transport. The MHRD has information about all schools, colleges and universities in India. The list goes on and on.
All this data, when matched with that collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation, Central Statistical Organisation and Registrar General of India for the decennial Census can provide unthought of insights into how to make India more proficient.
Bringing transparency in data collection and sharing it widely would be the cheapest way of boosting the Indian economy.
What we in India need to realise is that there is a direct relation between knowledge, governance and economic growth. It would be too simplistic to presume, like many Indians do while aping French historian Michel Foucault, that the link with knowledge is about power alone. It also is about empowerment, improving efficiencies and creating new knowledge.