Data: The Currency, Gold and Diamond of the Future

GS Naveen Kumar Sep 04, 2017

The very idea of Smart City, when comes across us, gives a feeling where citizen finds themselves connected through IT to every other thing in a secured fashion. On the other hand, we have villages still far from the reach of the high-speed Internet.

Positively, it is expected that the things will improve in near future in this field. However, the moot question still remains in front of us, what and how the benefits can be transferred to a common citizen by the government? In a state like Uttar Pradesh, which is standing tall in terms of headcount of 20 crore citizens, the state machinery faces a challenge in identifying the beneficiaries and make available the best of governmental support.

The answer lies in the famous buzzword of the decade “Data is the new currency”. Just like the currency which moves into various hands but makes sense only when it is utilized well. In the same way, the data is present all around us, especially in the government departments, but proper analysis of data coupled with decision-making power can bring wonders into the life of common people.

Moving on the path of co-operative federalism or put it better 'sharing of ideas', we can take learnings from AePDS scheme of Andhra Pradesh. The scheme took advantage of Aadhar enabled data and made its Public Distribution System leak proof both in terms corruption and timely delivery. It saved whopping 1000 crore every year on subsidies. Taking cues from it and enabling IoT, Big Data Technologies and Data Science in collecting, refining and generating analytics will surely help to deliver better governance to the citizens.

Farming is one such area, where specialized IoT devices can generate alerts, give better suggestions to farmers in terms of irrigation, spreading pesticides and level of manure in the field. Also, the data generated in terms of the type of crops, yield, transportation requirement, market price etc. can produce better analytics data. This type of data if fed in real time can create wonders because this will lead the government to take faster decisions and deliver any help in a timely manner.

File movements have always been a point of concern for the citizens, corporates working with the government. Transparency in the system can speed up the process and generate quick results. Recent advancements in the Blockchain technology can address this challenge and improve the delivery of public services. The proponents of making a citizen charter regarding government services will feel elated when every transaction will happen with a timestamp attached to it.

Just like above examples, there are many other departments/sectors which can take benefit of the enormous amount of data generated through the system. However, we will need data classification, data cleaning, data integration, data transformation and data reduction before we move on to performing analytics over that data. It is for sure that data/currency generated through this ecosystem will surely give the value of gold at one point of time in future. Also, with the advancement in the field of machine learning who knows when the same data can mine out diamonds as well for us.

Time has come when we should graciously put a step forward in this direction and embrace the new technologies. It will open a box of opportunities in the field of electronics, IT and many other sectors and also revolutionize the way the governmental delivery systems. History is waiting to be written, we have to grab this moment with both of our hands and craft it in such a manner that we can become a leader in future technologies and governmental systems.