Indian School of Business launches portal to help boost economic recovery

Naveen S Garewal

Tribune News Service

Hyderabad, August 13

Indian School of Business (ISB) has launched a portal that brings together several high-frequency indicators (HFIs) of India’s Economic Recovery. This allows real-time analysis of patterns of economic recovery.

The portal, indiadataportal.com/jsi, is part of the JumpStartIndia@ISB project of the school. It will provide journalists, citizens, and policymakers visual insights into important indicators at a daily or monthly frequency in near-real-time and at the district or state level.

Prof Ashwini Chhatre, executive director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the ISB Indian School of Business, said: “As the economy recovers from the pandemic-induced lockdown, we are identifying and monitoring select parameters that indicate a change in the level of economic activity. This would help governments and policymakers in their plans and decision making to get India back on track of economic growth in the post- COVID scenario.”

The HFIs provide a range of data on multiple aspects of the economy, including fertiliser sales, trade in agricultural commodities, registration of new businesses, registration of different types of vehicles, digital transactions and payments and demand for wage labour under the MGNREGA.

In a statement released after the virtual event, the ISB said the portal also facilitated comparison of different high indicators for the current year (2020) with similar data for last year (2019).

“It is interesting to note that some indicators of economic activity like new company registrations and quantity of fertilizers sold are performing better than last year within a month of relaxation of the lockdown norms,” Chhatre said.

The data is sourced from public agencies. The daily updated indicators include the MGNREGA jobs and expenditure, fertiliser sales, economic value of agricultural commodities traded at mandis, digital payments, Aadhar authentications and electricity supply.

The list of monthly indicators includes company registrations, e-way bills, GST collections, foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment, railway freight for essential goods, and vehicle registrations by type. 

The data is now available in English and work is on to present it in six regional languages soon.