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budget, consultation, Delhi

Investing in Data: Pre Budget Consultation with the Finance Minister

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Last Thursday DataMeet was lucky to be invited to a Pre Budget Consultation with the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. We were invited to attend with the IT sector group and give some suggestions on how the next budget could invest in open data.

After some consulting with the various city chapter organizers we came up with some recommendations that could appeal to this audience.  We decided to emphasize that government data is a financial asset that needed to be invested in, in order for it to reach its optimal economic impact.  A stance the US government made in it’s open data policy.

You can read the note we submitted here:

The meeting was Thursday morning in Delhi at the Finance Ministry offices, Sumandro came to represent CIS and I attended to represent DataMeet.

The Finance Minister was there along with the Secretaries;
Shri R.N. Watal, Finance Secretary, Shri Shaktikanta Das, Secretary, DEA, Dr. Hasmukh Adhia, Revenue Secretary, Ms Anjuli Chib Duggal, Secretary, Financial Services and Dr. Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser (CEA).

It was a round table and the participants were organized by software and hardware, and we presented in the order we were seated.

  1. Shri Ramadas Kamath, Infosys,
  2. Shri P.V.Srinivasan, WIPRO,
  3. Shri Anil Chanana, CFO, HCL,
  4. Shri Pauroos D Karkaria,TCS,
  5. Shri R. Chandrashekhar, Chief Economist, NASSCOM,
  6. Ms Nisha Tompson, Founder, Datameet,
  7. Shri Vinod Sharma, Chairman, Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council,
  8. Shri Nitin Kunkolienker, Vice President, Manufactures Association for Information Technology (IT),
  9. Shri Rajoo Goel, ELCINA Electronic Industries Association of India,
  10. Shri Hari Om Rai, Co-Chairman Task Force on Mobile Phone Manufacturing,
  11. Shri Suraj Saharan Ajit Pai, COO,Delhivery,
  12. Shri Sumandro, the Centre for Internet & Society and
  13. Shri Vikas Jain, Member, Task Force on Mobile Phone Manufacturing

While most of the suggestions were related to tax breaks, subsidies, and trade issues, I was able to introduce the idea that the Government of India’s data is an economic asset that can help create markets, increase innovation, and allow for more accountability in scheme implementation. In order for the data to do these things it has to be opened up and that means the government must invest in the NDSAP policy and focus on data standardization, cleanup,  and collection. Also policies need to be reviewed and revamped in order to keep up with demand and use of data. Like the mapping policy should allow for more contributions from private sources and crowdsourcing so the Survey of India can keep up with demand for geospatial information. The Copyright Act also needs a clarification on the status of data and the Ministries must be willing to release data under open licenses.

In all the meeting was short, with the main focus being toward how to encourage manufacturing sectors because of the Make in India initiative. I was happy to be there and mention ideas and concepts that were not being discussed in rooms like that one and to also offer a perspective on open data.

We hope to keep in touch with the Ministry and continue to take advantage of any opportunity to share our experiences and views on how an investment in data can be a huge economic asset to India.

You can see the Government’s Press Release here.

Data

Guest Post: Varun Goel- Releasing Data for Agriculture

RRAN_logoVarun serves as the chief data scientist at a research team led by Dr. Ashwini Chhatre, serves as the Research Node of the Revitalizing Rainfed Agricultural Network – an India wide network of NGOs, civil society organizations, researchers, policy makers and think-tanks that aim to reconfigure the nature, amount and delivery of public investments for productive and resilient rainfed agriculture. 

The Combined Finance and Revenue Accounts (CFRA) report is an annual report prepared by the office  of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India to provides comprehensive Union and State government data on audited receipts, revenue expenditures and capital outlay for different major, minor and sub-minor heads.

Since the figures for actual expenditures on different heads may differ from actual  budget allocation by as much 15 to 20 percent, and that each state might have different procedures of auditing, the CFRA data provides reliable and fairly disaggregated figures of public expenditure, audited by a central authority.

The research team at the Revitalizing Rainfed Agricultural Network (RRAN) has scraped and processed the CFRA data from 2005-06 to 2010-11 for all general and economic services to understand statewide public investments in agriculture and allied activities, and highlight the mismatch in investment and needs on the ground.

The processed data, along with detailed information for each head can be forked here.

Although the data is only available at the state level, it can provide valuable insight on not just public expenditure in other domains such as urban development, health, central and state sponsored schemes, but also highlight the differences in budget allocation and actual spending of various government heads.

Revitalizing Rainfed Agricultural Network (RRAN) has practice and policy node that generates ground based evidence and block, district and state level for policy engagement, the research node’s objective is to generate evidence for testing key hypotheses to enable an articulation of the nature and magnitude of public support needed to fuel growth of India’s rainfed agriculture. To facilitate this, a Data Center has been set up with the aim of acquiring, reconciling, processing, visualizing and disseminating pan India datasets to assist in exploratory analysis and develop research hypothesis, backing up policy advocacy through scientifically rigorous data analysis, and implementing data-driven decision-making tools for program implementation by grass-roots level organizations.