As data-led use cases gain prominence in India, there is a steep rise in data-intensive projects used in public sectors by the Indian Government. In this article, we list down some of the less-talked-about data-driven projects across sectors such as agriculture, banking and demonetisation.
1.Project Insight: As reported earlier, the Indian Government launched a project called Project insight in 2017, to catch tax evaders. The project leveraged data mining techniques and analysed the data to achieve its objective of a corruption-free country. To get information about the black money, it tracked down 5000 entities that were in existence despite being deregistered. News reports cited MoS for Corporate Affairs mentioning the details from banks, which comprised 50,000 deregistered companies deposited and withdrew about Rs 17,000 crore during demonetisation. The Government leveraged big data to flag accounts with sizable black money deposits. AI and ML were leveraged to find patterns and trends in these bank accounts, to flag other accounts.
2.Agriculture: Agriculture is the backbone of India’s economy and the sector accounts for 18 percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) and provides employment to 50% of the countries workforce. But this sector has progressively declined to less than 15% due to the high growth rates of the industrial and services sectors. The country needs techniques to improve this industry and the government, with NITI Aayog is striving to help it. NITI Aayog had an agreement with IBM to develop a model for crop yield productions. This model is going to use AI and is going to help farmers to provide with real-time advice. The main objective is to improve the yields of small landholders.
3. Goods Flow: To see the flow of goods and how the trade is carried out in India, it had leveraged the GST network. It also released a survey that had first estimated the flow of goods across states by analysing the transaction-level data made available by the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN). It also had an account to track the number of people who migrated across the country every year using big data by using some unreserved railway passenger data, over a period of five years.
4.Geotagging: The Government is going to make use of big data to shell companies. Many companies that exist only on paper with the same address were found to be bogus transactions without commercial substance. The data consisting of coordinates of the registered companies will act as a key input for mining data in the ministry’s IT infrastructure called MCA21, to zero in on companies with a common address, common contact numbers, common directors and things like that. The objective is to identify many companies having the same address.
5.Water supply: The Kerala Water Authority (KWA) of the Government of Kerala is using IBM’s Analytics and Mobility solutions to analyse, monitor and manage water distribution in its capital – Thiruvananthapuram. Providing equitable water supply to all the households is a challenging task and due to various reasons such as bad pipelines and unauthorised use of water, water supply is not easily accessible to the city. With the help of the Big Data analytics system, the data monitored by IBM, KWA is tracking the water meters across the city. It resulted in improved revenue collection. With the Big Data solutions, KWA aims to achieve 100% success inequitable water supply with the ability to monitor and flag irregularities in water usage using sensors and intelligent meters.
6.Banking: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has made an announcement that it is going to set up an analytics lab for its in-house analytics in December this year. The work of this lab is going to include use cases from inflation management to banking supervision to financial inclusion. The State Bank of India (SBI) is another central government bank using big data. SBI set up its data warehouse in 2009 and is one of the biggest data warehouses in the world with 170 TB of data.
7.Transport: Andhra Pradesh is employing big data and analytics to launch a real-time monitoring system to monitor the performance of each department in its government. The aim is to increase transparency in the day-to-day government’s functioning through big data. “With data analytics, we are getting insights into the performance of government policies, analyze trends and predict the future behaviour of people and systems so that timely corrective measures could be taken. This helps in proper insight and corrective intervention for better governance”, J Satyanarayana, Advisor to AP Government had said. It plans on understanding citizens’ data, spending patterns of the government, consumption trends and the success of various government policies.
8.Poverty: Odisha government is banking on data analytics technology to ensure that the least served areas can benefit from Government Welfare schemes. Big Data also ensures people below the poverty line have access to food and other facilities.
9.Policies: Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje also signed an agreement with the US-based data warehouse firm, Teradata, to help them create a common data and analytics platform that can be used by all government departments across the state to collate and utilize data effectively. It is also going to enable a 360-degree citizens’ view by unifying multiple databases. The Karnataka Knowledge Commission, a commission constituted by the former CM of Karnataka, also has plans for data-driven governance and modernisation of the state administration.
In Conclusion
Indian Government has always shown a keen interest in adopting new technologies, especially big data and AI, in its functioning and states like Karnataka, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have entrenched data analytics policies in. With this collaboration, it aims to bring about better transparency, while efficiently delivering services to the citizens.
