Introduction
Early after its independence, India had adopted the model of a planned economy as the means of directing development efforts. Even today, our entire development effort is through a series of Five-Year Plans undertaken by the planning organs of the Government, both central and provincial.
Since all planning was based on the availability of statistics, data collection by the Government has been oriented towards feeding into the planning process for over half a century. Since the planning process is driven by a number of other priorities, data has often been a casualty in this process. It would not be far off the mark to state that accuracy, level of desegregation, and timeliness of most of the data that is available for public use is dubious. However, in most cases, there being no parallel source that can validate the official sources of data, all actors-be it the industry or civil society-is forced to use this data.
It is important to realize that the role of data has undergone substantial change the world over. Arising from the recognition that data is crucial to decision making-whether operational, tactical or strategic-organizations ranging from NGOs to corporations to governments are creating structures to generate, capture, collate and present data. The availability of electronic media has played a crucial role in both capturing and presenting data.
Structurally too, there are changes taking place in data. As the role of statistics move from 'data' to 'information' to 'knowledge', the repositories too, evolve from databases transform themselves to information- and knowledge bases. This note looks at the specifics of data requirements for the Information Technology (IT) sector and tries to identify the specific requirements of this sector.
IT Sector: The Two Dimensions
IT is characterized by its two distinct roles: one, that of an industry, sharing attributes common to other industries (for example, employment generation, capital investments, or contribution to domestic income). In its other role, IT is a service, catalyst and tool, much like other instruments such as education or health services that seek to improve the quality of life of the citizens of a country.
Considering that much of the future of governance is closely coupled with computerization of the citizen-government interface, this latter dimension is immensely important in improving the responsiveness, transparency and effectiveness of the process of governance.
Data Requirements: An Overview
Why do we need data? In the case of the IT industry, there are several reasons why accurate, timely, disaggregated data is crucial to the development of the industry.
Availability of data will enable all stakeholders to:
gather insights regarding the status and health of the industry;
determine weaknesses and address them using appropriate policy instruments;
facilitate comparison with other states or countries to determine our degree of competitiveness;
compare our own performance over several years;
plan for the future; and
provide opportunities for entrepreneurs.
What drives the requirement of data for the IT sector? It would be important to examine this question from the two dimensions of IT as outlined earlier:
IT as an industry
number of industrial units
total domestic and export turnover
sub-sectors (eg., IT, IT Enabled Services)
employment generated
capital outlay
market analysis
infrastructure availability (eg., connectivity)
cost structures
Forecasting of crucial indicators based on their current trends needs to be another important area of focus.
IT As An Enabler
The information requirements are less clear in this case, but no less important. Some of the metrics that need to be available include:
penetration of computers (availability and access for citizens)
network penetration (availability and bandwidth)
availability of repair and maintenance services
availability of software development services
training institutions based on level of training imparted
digital literacy (at least for special groups such as teachers or students)
percentage of applications in vernacular languages
availability of digital content of relevance to the target groups
Although the conventional urban-rural divide is much less pronounced in Kerala, it would be interesting to have this information separately for rural & urban Kerala as also for forward and backward districts and for males and females.
4.0. An Action Plan
The data requirements outlined above requires a non-trivial quantum of effort. While accuracy is desirable for any kind of data collection, the IT industry will demand data of considerably higher degree of accuracy-if the data does not reflect "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth", there is a high chance of it being rejected outright.
This degree of precision requires a combination of two strategies:
a carefully planned out sample survey based on stratified sampling
collation of information from relevant departments
The Government may need to partner with industry associations and/or grassroots level organizations to do this job better. The Computer Society of India (CSI)-a national not-for-profit professional Society set up in 1965-is presently in the process of designing a sample survey to assess the penetration of Information Communication Technologies in rural and urban Kerala, for the IT Department, Govt. of Kerala. This may be a good starting point.
Conclusion
Data is of undeniable importance to the development process. There is very little baseline information available for the IT industry today. However, the IT Policy document released last year does not mention anything about the creation of a data repository for the industry. It is important that we recognize and address this information gap, and provide support to the Government and private efforts to build databases in this crucial sector.
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