 Sorry in the process. We also help governments opening up data. So currently we're working with the government of Telangana So I thought I'll talk about in general the challenges in opening up data and Our experience with you know the government of Telangana. So this is from the preamble of the right to information act So I'm sure most of you know right to information act that was passed in the year 2005 Hailed as one of the best legislation this country has ever seen. This is from the preamble so Most of what we are talking about in open data or information from the government actually flows from this preamble So it talks about, you know, we need to have an informed citizenry and informed citizenry is not possible without Government supplying information and informed citizenry in cross in the process will help in you know controlling corruption and ensuring that all the government You know instrumentalities in terms of bureaucracy the political system is accountable Now so there is a specific provision in the right to information act, which is called section 4 Which actually talks about proactive disclosure from the government. So right now if you You know people with experience in dealing right to information applications would know that is mostly demand based So you you make an application government will supply whatever information But there is also a supply based provision in the act A lot of people do not know which is section 4 section 4 actually talks about proactive disclosure from the government of about 17 items Which actually covers budgets as well So when we talk about open data open data actually flows from section 4 where governments without people asking for it Should actually disclose Now we say it shouldn't be that data is available, but people cannot access it So with after the advent of right to information, it's close to 12 years now. So I can Show you the transformation. So this is pre 2005 Municipal medical records in a government hospital to You collect rating now go down now this took a long time Of course 12 years and I'm not trying to say that this is a situation in every office. It has changed But unfortunately this hasn't helped us go here So we still deal with like our was saying PDFs unstructured data, you know Even when you use RTI people give you physical format. So while Information is now open people are able to access information. It's still quote-unquote not much in the form that we want So ideally we want governments to open up data in the sense every government like, you know, one of the one of them was saying that they Publish in a structured format that people can readily use So briefly let's talk about the government structure. I think that will clarify a lot of things that questions people have So, you know, let us not be under the assumption that the government isn't monolith government is not a monolith So each government department is their own boss So at the central government level, there is this ministry called a ministry of statistics and program implementation Which usually generates a lot of data Especially for policy framing. So they have three different wings. One is the National Sample Survey office You you might have heard about national sample surveys. So these are surveys done on a On a certain sample size covering all the states. So every once in a while So they they don't take ten years like the census. They're done. So some of them done twice every Five years some of them once every ten years and so on so forth Then there is the central statistical office, which calculates our GDP So you must have heard about this office recently because of the whole, you know That we ask about is the government fudging GDP data, etc. So this the chief statistician comes from here So they publish GDP data they publish inflation data and all that the third one is a program implementation wing within the mosque be so this actually monitors a lot of big infrastructure projects it's called IFMD they also have something called the IFMD Infrastructure management division. So they regularly monitor all the big infra projects now within this they also have When a mosque be has government of India has come up with a guideline Sometime ago where they said any big project of government of India or any scheme for that matter Which has an outlay of more than 150 crores will have to be monitored and we'll have to have an online system that people can Government can track it. So which is why you see a lot of schemes which a huge outlay of hundreds of crores Usually have a working MIS So this is at the central government level now while is this the only department that generates data? No, this is one of the departments, but they're only job is generation of data But on the other side you have every department every ministry at the government of India level generating data like for example the Ministry of Finance Generating budget data year after year the Ministry of Health generating some other health survey data So it is not as if there is a unified vision of data generation where we say, you know, every government entity will Generate data in a specified format. So that's one issue At the state government level we have Department of planning at the state level each state has a department of planning So this acts like must be at the state level. So we have a state level data of economic surveys that are released during budget time So within within the department of planning, we have the directorate of economics and statistics So they release annual reports of states every year if you follow annual reports So this is more like a statistical snapshot of the state. So every year they release this report now Most NSS surveys also have state component in it in the sense. They also release data of the state level What is happening at the state level? Like I said, all of the line departments also generate a lot of data for their own need and purpose and there are independent agencies Which quote-unquote or within the control of the government. They also generate data based on the need. So I'm sure the problem is pretty clear now So it's not as if there is one standard one agency Mandating the data should be generated in a certain way. So part of the problem is this So even for example, even a village bunch higher the lowest tire of governance also generates data for their own need now Briefly about the national sample survey So the NSS does surveys and we read subjects broadly for subjects. The first one is socio-economics So this includes saving survey and saving survey and spending survey and travel pattern survey and various other things So if you go to the Moss pay website, you'll find all these interesting surveys. They also do a Five-year survey on every five years. They do this survey and land holding livestock and agriculture So, you know, you'll find what is average land holding in India? How many are small farmers? How many are marginal farmers? How many are large farmers? Same with livestock. They also have a livestock census that goes with normal senses of human beings and the agriculture census They also do surveys on establishment and enterprise so number of establishments, you know In each sector number of employees number of labor then village surveys They also do a lot of village level surveys to understand village issues. So broadly, these are subjects under which Must be the national sample survey office works So like I said, how is data generated in the first place so firstly a lot of data even today Especially in the large schemes is still manually entered. Now. There are multiple issues here Well, I'll tell you a case study of the energy is So we have for example for most government schemes, which For example NREGS the key is the master role. So must always more like Sheet in which the names of people who attended that day's work is written and with a signature So must role is proved that you attended that day's work and you are entitled to a certain amount of You know that this labor so we still a lot of data at the grass root level is still generated in physical forms And then manually entered so you can see there is scope for error there Then we have some automated applications where especially with respect to wherever we do GIS tagging So they do use automated applications and there are various registers which are later converted into You know the physical data is converted into machine readable form. So these days for example, you know At least in Telangana one of the departments has been using WhatsApp extensively to collect data So from school. So all the school headmasters would WhatsApp data in a specified format for five six parameters and then this goes to the central office where it is converted into an Excel And finally this Excel is so so there are varied formats in which data is collated and generated and Like I said automated. So especially with transaction data. So wherever government is involved in transactions. So that data is automated I'll briefly explain about the flow of the energy is I'm sure all of you know the national rural employment guarantee scheme which was Introduced in the year 2005 after the UPA came to power. So this was their flagship project So it talks about providing wage employment to all the rural people. So it doesn't differentiate between a rich man and a poor man So any individual living in a rural area is entitled to get work Now if you though, this is probably one scheme with the largest outlay in this country So in the last ten years the outlay has been more than three lakh crores Across the country. So if you look at this First one is registration of the worker. This happens physically. So at the Grand Panchayat office, there is a form that one needs to fill saying I want to get enrolled as a worker So you'll have to submit a few proofs That is the first step and after this is done. This is actually entered into the system. So PE talks about post event So it's not real-time entry into the system But once those physical forms are filled a bunch of them go to usually what happens is again I'm speaking from a Telangana experience. It could be different in different states. Usually the block office has a dedicated You know place where about five to ten systems would be there with internet connection And all people from the village collect collect these physical forms go to the block office They reserve some time and then do this entry. So most offices at the block level use that dedicated space for online entry So then you have issuance of the job card. So once you apply for Work so the form is proper. Then you're issued a job card again. This is physical Then demand for work. So the scheme is a demand-based scheme. It's not supply-based scheme So in other words I as a worker can go and demand for work saying, you know, I don't have any other work elsewhere So I want to work so that demand is captured There's also some in some states. It's happening real-time not in all states Then work allocation. So how it works is there is a shelf of works decided by the gram panchayat So there is a list of works and ideally the gram panchayat should decide that work work should be taken up as priority So there's a lot of criteria involved. So then work allocation happens Then e-muster, of course, like I said e-muster is not There in all states some states are doing it e-muster is like the electronic master. So once work happens You capture the attendance then the master is Generated where it talks where it has names of workers along with the amount that they should be paid And then if you see the entire flow, so the daily attendance Preparation of mbm is measurement book. So once the work is done There is a technical engineer who comes in measures the work done and based on the measurement There is a there's something called known as schedule of rate. So based on the schedule of rate based on the amount of work Done the particular wage rate is decided. So it is could be hundred one fifty one seventy and that is transferred to the The wait seekers bank account then the preparation of wage list wait slip FTO is nothing but a finance transfer order. So financial transfer order which talks about Act money actually going to the wait seekers account. So the entire flow now as you know It is actually very very complex and we are only talking about one scheme of the government of India, which you know in terms of budgetary figures It's less than five percent of government's budget At an overall level so you can imagine the complexity we are dealing with So to tell you the format so these are the physical formats so job card application for job card So somebody has to apply in this this format an application of work Of course these are translated into local languages. They're not available in English Then this is how the master role looks like the physical master role then transformed into the electronic must roll And this is how it happens on the ground. So this is the work site This is the engineer measuring and again the engineer measuring. So this is the work a road laying work This is for example building a tank water tank So you can imagine the complexity This is a snapshot from the energy MA so this is one scheme like I said with Schemes with a huge outlay. We have a working MIS So if you go to energy a dot NIC dot in so all this data that I explained to you before is available on that MIS the snapshot from that MIS So you can actually go up to the worker level wage seeker level to understand what kind of works did you do in the last so Many years what was the amount of money that was given to him in the last so many years the kind of works done at a Block level at a village level. So what is the ratio between material and men so all that? Now just to understand the complexity of this data like I told you the expenditure in the last ten years has been You know close more than three lakh crore Then how many percent days of work was generated? 1980 crore percent is which is 18 times of population Then there are 25 crore wage seekers not active, but people are enrolled into the scheme till date there are about more than 12 crore works that were done on the ground and On an average every day about 50 lakh percent days of work is generated. So in other words You know ballpark average about 50,00,000 people get work from government. So this is a complex to be dealing with now What is the status of you know data generation data disclosure in the government? Like I said for major schemes We do have MIS at various levels. There's a central government MIS. There'll be a state government MIS So the data will be available in some structured format. So pensions PDS. So all the schemes with huge outlay you have this Then For smaller schemes, we have data that is maintained at local systems. We don't have it on the internet So it should be on the computer of you know some Clerk or some officer so it will be in his system So there could be schemes with an outlay of five crore six crore They don't have an MIS, but still five crore six crore is not a small amount. So they are maintained at a local level and Then still for example village budgets. So though we have Panchayat Raj ministry Software to capture village budget. It's still not so a lot of villages still follow the manual paper budgeting procedure So I'll let me spend some time in talking about this now a Lot of people think technology is the issue in the sense, you know The issue in opening up government data is technology. No, that's not the case The bigger issue in opening up government data is trying to change their culture. So they have a culture of secrecy has gone on for close to 60 years now and The same kind of resistance we see even in right information. So when somebody applies under RTI getting information I know if somebody has applied you will know the pain So the first thing that anybody has to deal with is the culture How do we make them understand that you are part of the changing culture? It's no more secret. A lot of government officials derive their power from holding this information So it is very very difficult to part with this information So they feel that everybody then will become powerful their power is taken away. So culture is a huge issue Well, we might discount Saying, you know, why can't the government just mandate everybody to do it's not as easy The second one is fear. There's a lot of fear within the government official government bureaucracy about misuse of data So for example This also partly comes from their own understanding of technology because you know, there was an official who was telling me if I Put an Excel on the internet can somebody not download the Excel change it and upload it back So this was his fear that somebody would actually change the data So this partly came from his own lack of understanding of technology and partly from you know Because at the end of the day, they have rules that are very strict and anything that happens with data. They are liable So these are two big challenges You know, wherever you go if you talk to government officials at various levels, they're two big fears The third one is lack of capacity Frankly speaking, does our government have the capacity to handle data at this scale? Frankly, no So how are they able to manage today? So each department has their own vendor So yes government has a technology being called the National Informatics Center, but not every State government or every scheme is handled by them. So I'll tell you an example, you know health department, for example in Telangana has eight different modules eight different modules and each one is developed by different vendor so The partly one reason because they don't have that big picture understanding they tend to Do temporary work. So I have a need today. I need a solution today Let me develop something. But how does it actually connect to what is already there? How does it connect in the long term? People don't understand. So these are I think four big reasons challenges in opening up data. So while there is a lot of work on the technology front I believe in India, especially we we are not working enough on the first two Changing the culture trying to tell them that it's a changed world. It's no more 1950s 60s So we are facing the same issues with right information as well. So when people ask that culture of sharing information then So about I'll briefly tell you about the Telangana open data initiative. What we're trying to do Small video. Yeah, I hope you all understand. I'll go to the next slide So what we're trying to do with the Telangana open data policies is actually addressing the first two You know while we are also addressing technology not that we are discounting technology. So The the government does not believe in going Villager and and opening up, you know all data sets but Wants to take it in a phase-wise manner where we talk to officials Explain it to them that you know why sharing is important. How can we change their own internal culture of data sharing? Then we're also focusing on like I said the challenges So we intend to hold regular community events. I'll also tell you an example So I am not sure how many of you know the Elangana government has reorganized its districts So the earlier 10 districts are now 31. So even for example, Google does not have maps today of those 31 So the government will soon release their finalizing boundaries So we already have a dedicated data portal Data dot telangana dot gov dot in there are very few data sets, but the intention is to make this more active So these are the new districts the shapefiles are getting ready as the mountains are getting finalized So very soon the government will release them So I'll one more case study and we'll probably end it. So ma wumi is Is the comprehensive land records portal of the government of telangana? So it has land records up to a village level up to the individual beneficiary level So it's in each state. It's called by a different name in Telangana. It's called Pahani village Pahani Pahani is nothing but a register that contains the land records now for each Land ownership record. There are more than 10 parameters that are there in this in this MIS For example, if this is screenshot, it's in Telugu. So it talks about the total extent how much is Cultivable how much is not cultable? What is the source of water for that particular land ownership? Who is the owner? Then various other things like that. So what kind of land is it? Is it dry land wet land various other stuff? So now what can be done with this? So we had a community event where a few students developed this so we wanted to develop a village dashboard So at a village level can we this is one data set the agriculture data set So can we in the same way can we source more data sets and then prepare a village level dashboard for planning? So for example, this comes from the ma wumi website is an example What we are done was to understand the land ownership in that village So what is the total ownership average ownership? How many small farmers big farmers? So how much of the land is actually cultivable? So what kind of sources does that village have etc? So going forward the idea is you know take such case studies take such data sets and involve community in developing various solutions But probably I'll discuss this in the OTS session. We don't have enough time So what do we expect from the community like I said The government intends to hold regular events. We'll keep informing you Please participate in them then please Provide suggestions or request for data sets like I said the data that you want may not be available But if it's available, we'll try and push departments. Please come up with solutions So a lot of problems to be solved so government is open if you have an idea that can actually solve a real problem Please come forward and you have any ideas. Please write to that email Thank you We can have a few questions question This site So there is a already existing portal of open data.gov.in So how different is your approach towards that from the data set? Yeah, I see a lot of data is being uploaded there and that's still available public Data.gov.in like you know is the government of India portal and government of India usually has aggregated data of states So the data comes from central government departments As you know the real if you want to call the useful data would be hyperlocal data not the aggregated data So usually the central government does not hold hyperlocal data. It is with the state governments So what the data portal of Telangana intends to do is provide that hyperlocal data So aggregated data. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel So which is already available in data.gov.in. It will probably the data set will also be available here But the idea is not that so First of all this is regarding the rural employment scheme Just regarding the rural employment scheme. So Is that an insurance for these people? Is that is that an insurance? Insurance for these people who are working No, there's no insurance. There's no insurance because there is an accident claim accident compensation But there's no insurance compensation given if you If something happens to you while you're at work, but that is only for the BPL, right? That's only for the BPL, right? The rural employment guarantee scheme does not differentiate BPL, APL So it's anybody living in a rural area if you want work, you can demand work from government So work is different from insurance. Yeah, work is different from insurance, right? So because APL and BPL both work, but what I Read recent times is like it's only the insurance is only covered or accidental insurance is only covered for the BPL And not for APL. No, there's see like I said as far as I know I Could be wrong, but there is compensation for accidents on site There's no insurance as such More questions? We've developed this whole model for Telangana, which we know is like a new state so you can have all the Latest technologies and the latest trends implemented in it. Now once you've developed this model How modular is it that other states can adapt it? Like how have you taken that thought into consideration? Yeah, though Telangana is a new state it has a legacy of the last 60 years So the new state is only in the name So the state still has all the ills that you've seen a typical bureaucracy So in that way the state is not different, but the leadership is very open in terms of changing now when we say modules See I'm actually not talking more about technology. So for example The data portal of the state is actually developed in an open-source platform called decan. So which is Another version of secan what we are intending to do is build a model by which where we force changes in the culture and not just You know give them a technology mandate something and then make them give data sets today and tomorrow When you and I are not there data set doesn't come so that is precisely what is happening with data dot go today The government level so it is not a legislation. So we have to understand so this is still Policy where we say where we ask government departments request them to open up data So in terms of our priorities So once the state is successful in opening up a lot of data and actually solving problems It being useful to various stakeholders the idea is to document all this and share it with whoever wants to it will be available on the website as well One last question I want to ask like you talked about different kind of data you collect that is socio economic land holding I'm curious to know like is there any geospatial kind of data like which you collect and like processes or bus stops See again, it varies from department to department. So for example if bus stops have to be captured It is a municipal corporation that has to do it. So there is no agency. Yes, there is a there is an agency that deals with geospatial in every government So we have something known as TS track, but their mandate is not to geotag everything So their mandate is to prepare maps and boundaries. So it is a department's priority So if bus stops have to be mapped the local municipal corporation has to do it. So there is no I wouldn't say The date the geospatial data is being generated a large scale today, but there is an effort in certain departments to do it So most of the for example the energy a works are now geotag Most energy a works are now geotag in terms of, you know, where was it worked and what kind of work and in large schemes It is happening definitely but in smaller schemes and smaller departments. It's not yet done Which is data? Which is what I'm telling you so Right now the data portal of Telangana is very very nascent So you won't have a lot of data sets very very basic data sets the baseline data sets So in the days to come we intend to do that Not right now, but in future probably six in six to twelve months Thanks Rakesh. That was a great talk and people who have more questions can catch Rakesh and Gaurav at the OTR session Which starts at 2 5 p.m. in