Data is the defining word of the 21st century technology landscape — powering a variety of personalised services by linking granular data from many sources and permeating our collective consciousness. In the realm of governance as well, citizens expect seamless and coordinated delivery of services by the government.

As Covid-19 demonstrated, governments today require multiple departments and their frontline functionaries to collaborate and share data to respond to a wide range of complex challenges, with studies indicating that data access and sharing can help generate social and economic benefits worth between 0.1 per cent and 1.5 per cent of GDP in the case of public-sector data (OECD, 2019).

While sharing data between departments has always been a ‘North Star’, initiatives in this vein have not borne much fruit as the integration has often been done on aggregated data. Such aggregated data loses sight of local issues essential for effective targeting of beneficiaries and assessing the impact of policies. When I look back at my assignments as head of development oriented government departments in West Bengal in 2017-19, I can imagine the revolutionary impact that data sharing at grassroots level across departments would have had.

For example, before a home visit by an Anganwadi worker, she would have been able to get information on the status of a family’s health and nutrition and share onward with privacy safeguards with other grassroots level workers of all related departments — allowing a more holistic picture of overall household health and nutrition to emerge and for the government to be brought to the household as ‘one entity’.

The initial emphasis on digitisation in government was on making specific legacy functions more transparent through data. For instance, the formation of polling parties for panchayat elections in 1993 was computerised for the first time in Malda, West Bengal. The focus then was on using the data of a specific function to randomly assign personnel to booths — leading to gains in transparency and efficiency. Later, the thrust of digitisation shifted to real time integration of a basket of functional data.

The evolution of digitisation in government from an initial focus on specific functions in departments to core departmental operations needs to be taken to its logical conclusion by enabling real time sharing of granular data between departments. Of course, privacy and security standards should be evolved and adhered to for safeguarding citizens’ data. To do this, we must concurrently engender an architectural shift, a mindset shift and an administrative shift.

Departments need to shift their mindset to treating data as a ‘product’ rather than just a by-product of their operations.Sharing will be accomplished by each department publishing a data catalogue (metadata) and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) — enabling a system that is at once agile, robust and secure.

In order to facilitate this, the following administrative steps need to be taken. First, the quality of publishing of curated data fields to the central catalogue needs to be tracked at the highest levels of government with departmental Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined. Second, data scientists need to be embedded in a distributed manner across departments and empowered by a direct reporting line to the head of the department. Finally, the centralised aspects of data governance should be carried out by a Central Metadata and Governance Authority.

The writer is Secretary to the Government of India and Member (Finance), Space Commission and Atomic Energy Commission. Views are personal

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