Big data analytics plays a key role in real-time governance and can make governments take the right decisions, said Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Chairman J. Satyanarayana.
He was making the connection between better governance and big data analytics during his keynote address at the 5th International Conference on Big Data Analytics-2017 at IIIT on Wednesday.
Speaking on the Andhra Pradesh government’s DataLytics initiative, Mr. Satyanarayana, who is also the Advisor to the A.P. Government, said the objective of the module was to provide insights into the performance of government policies, analyse trends and predict the future behaviour of people and systems so that timely corrective measures could be taken. Citing the example of agriculture and education, he said big data allows for prescriptive analysis. This helps in proper insight and corrective intervention for better governance.
DataLytics, he said, can be used in several sectors, including health, agriculture, employment and planning, among others.
Touching upon the challenges, he said, “You need to build a cadre of data scientists in the public sector. If they know the domain well, then they can do a good job.” He opined that there were vast tracts of unstructured data. These include data from different sources, including social media. This can be harnessed and analysed to understand what opinion people have of the government. “The unstructured data comes from newspapers, Facebook, Twitter and whatever that is available in the public domain. These are digested on an hourly basis. They talk about the problems in various areas and the grievances,” he said.
