In continuation of the series, “Building a Political Digital Campaign team in India“, this post will focus on the websites the team needs to refer to get authentic government data. The visualization of data becomes very important in an election campaign, be it print, TV or digital. A high-quality infographic conveys a lot of messages.
Given a topic there is a team that hunts for data, I call them hunters. There is a lot of raw data that comes from this team. It has to be cleaned up, organized before you try to make sense of it. This could be done by another team, I call them farmers. Then you have the visualizers of this data, the marketers.
I had earlier written about the lack of government data being available in the public domain in India, at least I haven’t found anything on the lines of USAFacts.org. There is a big opportunity to build one in India on the lines of USAFacts.org.
During election time, the teams need to be very quick in collating data which needs to be used for offence and defence. Ideally, you should have a bank of infographics ready anticipating the questions that will arise or you will need to ask.
You should also access fake news busters regularly which could come in handy.
Government Data Sites in India
- MyGov.in
- Data.gov.in is intended to be used by Government of India Ministries/ Departments their organizations to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use. The directory of Chief Data Officers of various ministries is available here.
- Census Commissioner of India
- National Crime Records Bureau
- Reserve Bank of India
- Ministry of Finance: Lots of data and statistics related to the economy.
- Finance Commission of India:
- Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation: Plenty of public documents and downloadable data.
- National Family Health Survey of India: India’s demographic and health policies and programmes
- National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog): Lots of statistics for each state.
- Planning Commission of India: For data before 2014, the previous avatar of NITI Aayog.
- Press Information Bureau: All Press Releases of various ministries are released on this site. If you use advanced Google search properly you can get a lot of authentic data from here.
Non-Government Data Sites in India
These sites are a good starting point for you to have an understanding of the underlying data. Few of these sites could have a political leaning, due to which they may not show you the entire picture.
- Factly: Making Public Data Meaningful
- How India Lives: aims to organise a massive amount of public data on India and make it available in a searchable, comparable and visual format.
- IndiaSpend: India’s first data journalism initiative.
- IndiaStat: India’s most comprehensive e-resource for socio-economic statistical data
- SocialCops: On a mission to confront the world’s most critical problems through data intelligence.
Other posts in this series are,
