Datascape 2024: A Deep Dive into Strengthening India’s Socio-Economic Data Ecosystem

On November 29, the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), organised Datascape, a full-day event focussing on socio-economic data in India. Organised at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, the event featured reflections and conversations on how to strengthen India’s socio-economic datasets and widen their use and understanding.

The opening address was delivered by Dr. Saurabh Garg, Secretary at the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI). In his remarks, Dr Garg spoke about “Official statistics in India – Unlocking the power of data for development”. He highlighted various initiatives being undertaken by the MoSPI to make India’s official statistics more accessible to a wide set of users. The session was a befitting start to our day. The address was chaired by Ashish Dhawan, Founding Chairperson of Ashoka University.

The first panel delved into “Democratising and widening the use of public statistics”. The panel featured Soumya Kapoor Mehta of the World Bank, Ashish Kumar of the Pahle India Foundation, Udit Misra of The Indian Express and JV Meenakshi of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, and moderated by Ashwini Deshpande, Professor and Head at Ashoka University Economics department.

The second panel turned the spotlight on four critical civic data initiatives and dived into the role they play in strengthening India’s data ecosystem. It featured Hari Krishna Vetharenian of the DevDataLab, Pallavi Choudhari of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)’s National Data Innovation Centre, Shobana Venkatasubbu who manages Janaagraha’s Municipal Finance initiative and Govindraj Ethiraj, founder of IndiaSpend and Factcheck. The conversation was moderated by Anisha Sharma, Associate Professor of Economics at Ashoka University.

In the evening, members of the CEDA team introduced CEDA’s work to the audience. Anisha Sharma, a founding member of the Centre, spoke about the origin of CEDA and Kanika Mahajan, Associate Professor of Economics and currently a member of CEDA’s Advisory group talked about some of our data tools. Akshi Chawla, Director at CEDA, gave the audience a presentation on CEDA’s vision and current work. The three members also spoke in more detail about CEDA’s work with Govindraj Ethiraj.

The last panel of the day dived into the nuances of women’s economic labour. To set the context, Akshi Chawla, who moderated the session, gave the audience an overview of female labour force participation in India based on recent data. This was followed by a conversation with independent journalist Namita Bhandare, Neha Dixit, author of ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ and Ashwini Deshpande, on how to think about the subject from a data perspective.

The event was attended by more than 125 participants and saw a day full of rich and lively conversations on various aspects of socio-economic data in India. CEDA hopes Datascape will be an annual event, rather an annual festival celebrating and thinking about all-things-socio-economic-data going forward.