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Integrating the vast sets of alternative, administrative and survey data and sharing it with the public while ensuring privacy and anonymity is a challenge, said the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) secretary Saurabh Garg on Thursday.
“Apart from the survey data, the government has (nearly) 200 data sets of administrative figures. We need to be able to integrate survey, alternate and administrative data in a statistically robust manner. We have a set of data available but access is an issue. We need to define clearly what kind of data we have access to, as we have to keep in mind anonymisation and privacy,” he said while addressing a seminar on ‘Leveraging Non-Conventional Data sources for Official Statistics’.
He further added that over the last few months, MoSPI has defined national metadata standards to lay down clear definitions for data collection and set out a quality assessment framework for various ministries which collect the information. The ministry has also set out common identifiers to ease interoperability.
“We have issued a set of common identifiers, which could be used by different ministries and departments which will help correlate GST and road toll data to get a sense of GDP data so we can make sense of it,” Garg added.
Besides personal identifiers, the ministry is also exploring goods and services tax (GST) data and spatial identifiers such as satellite data to create robust frameworks.
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“Using one of these identifiers will help us better decision-making,” Garg said, citing the smart meter data, which, he said, can be used to gauge electricity consumption.
The seminar aimed to deliberate upon the ways and means of using the non-conventional data along with the conventional data generated through the censuses, surveys, and administrative records. These non-conventional data sources include data from earth observation (satellite images), mobile telecommunications (call records), social networks (sentiment analysis) among others.
“The non-conventional data sources become an opportunity to complement the existing official data available with the statistical community,” said MoSPI in a statement.
Also speaking at the event, Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder, Infosys and chairman of Expert Committee on Non-Personal Data (NPD) Governance Framework by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said that there is an opportunity to create a framework for access to private data, by specifying legal and rightful use of private data for providing services to people.
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