The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, publishes important annual statistical reports. “Crime in India” details annual crime statistics – different types of crimes at district level, “Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India” provides statistics on accidental deaths – road as well as otherwise like wildlife conflicts, and suicidal deaths including causes of suicides. Road Accidents in India is an annual report published by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), Government of India. It contains detailed statistics of road crashes in India including at district level.

What is common to all these reports is that they were last published in December 2023 for the year 2022. Almost all reports now that make a case about road crashes, crimes or suicides still use the last report from 2022 or answers in Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha.

The No Data Ages

Data is important to track governance and nail accountability. For instance, an increase in road crash fatalities means that the Government is failing to improve road safety, and decrease in Per Capita Income suggests a stagnating economy, both of which the Government is accountable for.

However, a lack of data has been the norm for a few years now. While during the Covid-19 pandemic the Government famously said that they don’t have data on the number of migrants affected, withholding of data is becoming increasingly common in other departments too. The Right to Information Act is also being diluted making it difficult to access crucial data.

Unfortunately, this is a trend being seen across central, state as well as local governments. Without a law mandating that data has to be shared publicly through their websites, governments are not legally bound to share data on their websites. In many cases the data is also shared through WhatsApp, if asked.

In general, there are four methods that governments commonly employ to avoid sharing data publicly. These four methods also represent a scale where data is made increasingly more difficult to get as you move from one model to the next.

Google Governance

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has two websites: site.bbmp.gov.in and bbmp.gov.in. While the latter was supposed to be the upgraded site, the former continues to be operational with data and reports appearing in either of the sites. It is hard to know where any new reports are going to get uploaded, if they do.

In cases like this, regular reports like budgets suddenly stop appearing in the usual places. Reports are directly uploaded and their storage links are exposed with no specific linkage from the home site. For instance, budgets of the Greater Chennai Corporation are no longer shared on the Finance Department‘s site which only lists the budgets till 2022-23. Since 2023-24, the budgets are shared directly as https://chennaicorporation.gov.in/gcc/Budget_2023-2024/. For further years you can change the URL, but there is no linking from their main website.

What happens is there is no fixed data repository where periodic reports are collected over time, and in the case of multiple websites, people eventually lose track of where a particular document needs to be uploaded.

Data sharing model: The data is technically on the website, but unfindable without Google’s help.

WhatsApp Governance

The Economic Survey of Karnataka is an annual report which works like the Central Economic Survey, detailing the state of the economy of Karnataka. While the Karnataka Government was publishing all reports on their site, the last report they published is of 2023-24. The one for 2024-25 was not put up on their site, but was distributed through WhatsApp groups. The report we received through such sharing is shared here.

Unfortunately, this has been the trend for other datasets too. The BBMP Budget with an outlay of close to Rs. 20,000 Cr is not public on their website and was shared only through WhatsApp. While we managed to find it and share on our site, we have not been that lucky with other budgets that follow this model. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) presented a budget of Rs. 17,000 Cr without making the budget files public on their site. The Pune Municipal Corporation chose to make two documents public, but only in Marathi.

In all these cases, they have functioning websites where these reports were being shared, until a few years ago. The documents are now available, but not on their website.

Data sharing model: The data is there and you can access it only if you know whom to ask.

Dashboard Governance

The CPCB has a great dashboard on the real time air quality across India. While there is a link to a repository where you can download historic data, it only works till 2023. The same is true of MoRTH’s Parivaahan dashboard. While it is pretty to show real time data and charts, historic data that can be used for analysis stays hidden. Most importantly, the departments control what data they want to share in the dashboard.

Increasingly, this model is being used across the board. The Bengaluru Traffic Police’s traffic violations as well as road crashes data site has been stuck at October 2024, while they have launched a pretty dashboard which itself doesn’t seem to be using data beyond August or September 2024.

Data sharing model: The data is shown, but they choose what, how much and how you can see.

RTI Governance

This is a special category, where important documents that should be on the public domain are not, but can be obtained through RTI. Most infrastructure project DPRs fall under this category.

The Tunnel Roads project envisioned in Bengaluru to solve the city’s congestion is an important example. The DPR which was riddled with errors is not available on their website. However, the DPR has been obtained through RTI, and many have accessed the report to make their critiques.

While the Tunnel Roads is a large project, DPRs of smaller projects that affect a smaller section of the population aren’t easily available. There is a major road being planned from Lower Agaram to Iblur for which the DPR is not publicly available. There are innumerous flyovers and underpasses that are lying half-constructed across the city that affect lakhs of commuters each day, whose DPRs are not available in the public domain either.

Filing an RTI and getting a response after a month can help a few people who have the patience to go through the process. But it should be a norm for DPRs to be made public for any infrastructure projects.

Data sharing model: The data is technically public, but anyone who needs it has to make the effort of filing an RTI and waiting for a response.

No Data Governance

This is the final category where data that is inconvenient to the government is not shared at all. In 2019, the National Statistical Survey Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) published its employment survey report which painted a dark picture of the economy. The report was suppressed and top officials resigned in protest. In recent years, this has been the norm, where reports are being suppressed and their methodologies questioned when the data is inconvenient. Meanwhile, closer home, the caste survey conducted in Karnataka in 2015 has still not seen the light of the day.

Road Accidents in India, Crime in India, Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, Prison Statistics in India since 2023 are just some of the reports that have stopped being published in the public domain. The 7th Economic Census was conducted in 2019. Almost six years on, the data is still not in the public domain.

One of the most important datasets the Census of India, has not been started and the decision making for a country of 1.45 Billion people is dependent on a 14 year old census which counted 1.2 Billion people. 250 million people, around 15% of the population are uncounted and live outside the ambit of essential services like PDS and MNREGA provided by the Government.

Data sharing model: The data is there, but is too inconvenient for the Government to share.

Whither Data?

We are indisputably heading to what can only be called the data dark ages. A recent article listed all the datasets and surveys that need to have been done or their data published, but haven’t. Most of the data seems to be sliding gradually from the first model where links are not on the site, to the last model where reports are not shared, and collection of data in the form of surveys is either stopped or the methodology compromised.

What is missing is a legal mandate about making data public on websites and easily findable. The RTI revolution made it mandatory for government bodies to share any data that they are asked for. While it has been diluted over time, we need a similar legislation that makes sharing of public data mandatory with specific rules on how they need to be shared.