Thread by @muralipiyer

@amitabhk87 Sir ji, please don’t call India data rich. If there is a bumper crop but failed to harvest it, there will still be famine.
A lot of data in India is waiting to be harvested, but GoI or GoStates are not even bothering to collect it. With no relevant Data, you can forget Analysis.

@amitabhk87 Let me ask simple questions:
How many 5-9 yo children are not covered by a primary school within 1 km right now?
How many 10-12yo children are not covered by a secondary school within 2 km right now?
How many children are not covered by a high school within 4 km right now?

@amitabhk87 Then comes the tougher question of:
What’s the projected school-going population 5 years from now?
Where should new schools be built?
How many students will they serve?
Is there school overcrowding anywhere?

@amitabhk87 The two previous tweets were about the state of data collection shortcomings and analysis short comings.

This is just one small bit of one ministry.

AI can solve a lot of things. Off the shelf algorithms are enough to solve most problems. But we don’t have data for any of this.

@amitabhk87 Sir, these are merely the questions that I wanted to answer 4 years ago and I had to give up.
If we take the current covid crisis, it’s gets worse.
We do not know which areas can afford to follow Swedish model and which requires a draconian “triple lockdown” with home delivery.

@amitabhk87 Our death records get updated 2-3 years late.
I mean, the current data collection system can’t be used for real-time analysis.
We have absolutely no idea about deaths that are not reported.
We use a decade old data(census) and even that doesn’t include all questions.

@amitabhk87 We are only thinking about skills data.

Do you know how many factories are there in river banks and how much data is collected by various pollution control boards at point of outlet(I’m not even adding 1 km and 5 km down stream).

@amitabhk87 Yes, we are building digital land records.

No, we don’t have any idea of where and all a farmer can include additional sources of income like aquaculture or solar farms.

We don’t even have a database of available water sources for fire engines nationwide.

@amitabhk87 GoI is having a lot of good schemes initiated. I won’t argue about that.

But, the fact remains that we don’t have enough data collected to answer basic questions, let alone higher level forward looking questions.

We are data rich(if we had reaped) and data poor.

@amitabhk87 Sorry @amitabhk87 ji. I ended up tweeting a lot.
I’m sure you are far more aware of the challenges than a layman like me.

All I hope is that you can somehow manoeuver the departments and ministries to push more data(and more pressers) online and via DD/AIR.
Harvest the data.