State issues guidelines to sharpen data collection

Government to ensure purity of data, processes are maintained

The State government has decided to put in place guidelines to monitor quality of decentralised data collection by departments and district offices. The government has directed the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, an arm of the State Planning Department, to come up with a rule book to ensure ‘purity of data’ is maintained and processes of verification and validation are used all times, officials said.

The move comes following directions from the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, asking State governments to improve quality of administrative data, and invest time and resources judiciously. “Nationally a debate is raging on the employment figures since different sources have provided different estimates. The interpretation too is different. The government wants to ensure purity of data is maintained while leaving little room for misinterpretation,” said a senior official of the State government.

The Maharashtra government produces 1.25 lakh documents every day. Most of them are being stored at 75 centralised data centres, resulting in a high maintenance cost. While the coverage and scope of data collection from department and districts have improved over the years there remains a question mark on the quality, officials said adding the new guidelines will ensure synchronisation of data with technology. The new guidelines will add quality parameters, list out utility of data, purpose of collection in sync with the planning and policymaking. Often times, the data collected by departments on the directive of the judiciary remains half baked and yet submitted in a rush to meet the deadline. “This (in court cases) will now be done on the basis of a timeline ranging from one to three months,” officials said.

The government recently unveiled a public cloud policy, virtually mandating its departments to shift their data storage on to the cloud, which intends to make them available for free to citizens. This has been done to accelerate e-governance, and open an area for private sector investments, taking new technologies to all departments as the government is the biggest data creator and consumer, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had said at the Maharashtra Technology Summit in January.