Data Overwhelming in the Indian Social Sector – Part I – Data Journey

As Indian development sector professionals, when we wish to approach a problem statement, often the first question we ask ourselves is whether there is any data on this and if yes, where? This post is for anyone who belongs to the Indian development space, believes in a fact-based approach and wants to find the right data outlets to further their cause.

Before we move ahead let’s scratch our brains for a bit:

90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years and this number doubles every two years. We know that India, with a population of 1.4 billion people, is home to the second largest population (17.7% of the total world population) in the world. Hence, it’s safe to assume that there is a high influx of data in the Indian development sector as well.

Data is plural of datum (thing given). So, ideally, we should say “ there are enough data”, doesn’t that sound odd? That is because it is odd, in the modern ears at least. In today’s day and age, we use data as a mass plural noun, similar to ‘rain’ or ‘sand’. If you’re a grammar aficionado – is the tangent you were looking for.

Back to our core topic,

If there is a high influx of data in the Indian development sector, is this data captured? – “Yes, there is data!”

There are primarily three types of entities that are involved in the mammoth task of capturing this data:

We believe that all three entity types have an important role to play while collating the development sector data. As CTO Non-Profit members, our suggestion, to make full use of this post is to explore the various data sets mentioned in this post.