Use of ICT can usher in better governance

India's digital revolution is decentralising; a rapidly expanding ecosystem of ICT start-ups is working to offer solutions designed to solve many societal problems

With India home to the largest population of the world’s poor, the foremost national development imperative has always been community development. However, deploying development opportunities in India’s diverse geo-climatic and socio-economic landscape has been a complex mandate. 

India has, despite these complexities, created a streamlined community development agenda through a gamut of government welfare schemes and other civil society initiatives. This has translated to some gains in accelerating national development, literacy levels, creating infrastructure, and enhancing employment. However, there is still a definitive development deficit due to weak administration, despite the government putting over 2,700 schemes in motion across states.

The reason for this is crystal clear: Our development policies and promises across regions and districts are based on uneducated guesses, or at best, age-old data. 

Clearly, this past developmental approach has failed, as it is inconsiderate to the nation’s breadth, capacities and unique needs of different communities, their development needs, and the varying capabilities and attitudes of local government authorities. Comparable to navigating the oceans without a compass, our schemes will be ineffective without constant monitoring of needs, tracking the funding and need-specific expenditure in real time, all of which can enable administrators to track and course-correct progress. 

This is where the intervention of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) comes into play. 

Widely acknowledged to have put India on the world map, the ICT story has been concentrated in a few cities like Bengaluru and Pune. Now at an inflection point, India’s digital revolution is swiftly decentralising, and doing more for the country than just job creation. A rapidly expanding ecosystem of ICT start-ups is working to offer solutions designed to solve the many societal problems that have daunted generations of planners. This promising advent can be tactically used to increase the strategic competence of both local government administration and grassroots communities. 

The involvement of ICT can accelerate the impact of policy reforms, funding mechanisms and administrative channels, bringing access to developmental fundamentals such as education and timely and affordable health services. Its intervention can address the most significant developmental roadblock — that of a demonstrated lack of ownership among both the regional communities and governments — by increasing people’s participation and improving governance.

For example, data analytics can drive the basis of preparing and implementing a rural development plan that is more driven by grassroots realities, for both immediate and long-term needs. A data-led approach can also replace the current rural developmental planning process, which sees priorities decided in India’s cockpit — the national planning authorities, who have historically implemented in a trickle-down manner. 

While various governments have already initiated setting up data systems after several rounds of data collection activities in the past few years, their efforts are constrained by several challenges. Multiple departments collect and use data in isolation, their datasets have several gaps and lack systematic consolidations because data is often collected and stored in the inaccessible pen and paper mode, and data is still not timely, quickly losing relevance.

To fully realise the benefits of ICT in planning, the government should, before developing its internal capabilities and best practices, learn from specialised ICT consulting groups to build data collection, analysis, visualisation and updation in real time. Data science can be the critical catalyst to achieve India’s governance transition. Beneficiary profiles, entitlements, services delivered, shortfalls and other variables can be integrated and measured to yield a bird’s eye view of governance from the state and the central level. Along with building a culture of accountability to measurable goals and optimisation of resources, analytics helps create predictive models to achieve insights on the various directions India’s community development can take. 

More than just intent and funding, India’s architects needs to build an evidence-based system of governance, with modern data science and technology as its lifeblood.   

The writer has led the Tata Trusts’ data-intensive micro-planning and village development in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Jharkhand