Article by Ganesh Rao and Parul Agarwal: “Across India, state government departments are at the forefront of improving human capabilities through education, health, and nutrition programmes. Their ability to do so effectively depends on administrative (or admin) data1 collected and maintained by their staff. This data is collected as part of regular operations and informs both day-to-day decision-making and long-term policy. While policymaking can draw on (reasonably reliable) sample surveys alone, effective implementation of schemes and services requires accurate individual-level admin data. However, unreliable admin data can be a severe constraint, forcing bureaucrats to rely on intuition, experience, and informed guesses. Improving the reliability of admin data can greatly enhance state capacity, thereby improving governance and citizen outcomes.
There has been some progress on this front in recent years. For instance, the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity has significantly improved direct benefit transfer (DBT) mechanisms by ensuring that certain recipient data is reliable. However, challenges remain in accurately capturing the well-being of targeted citizens. Despite significant investments in the digitisation of data collection and management systems, persistent reliability issues undermine the government’s efforts to build a data-driven decision-making culture…
There is growing evidence of serious quality issues in admin data. At CEGIS, we have conducted extensive analyses of admin data across multiple states, uncovering systemic issues in key indicators across sectors and platforms. These quality issues compound over time, undermining both micro-level service delivery and macro-level policy planning. This results in distorted budget allocations, gaps in service provision, and weakened frontline accountability…(More)”.