ISB online portal to provide real-time indicators of India's economic recovery

Hyderabad: The Indian School of Business (ISB) launched an online portal 'https://indiadataportal.com/jsi' as part of its prestigious project [email protected] the initiatives at a virtual meeting on Thursday, Prof Ashwini Chhatre, Executive Director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business said that the portal brings together several high-frequency indicators (HFIs) of India's economic recovery to a common platform to enable meaningful and real-time analysis of patterns of economic recovery.

He said that it will provide journalists, citizens, and policymakers direct visual insights into important indicators at a daily or monthly frequency in near-real-time and district or state-level.

"As the economy recovers from the pandemic-induced lockdown, we are identifying and monitoring selected parameters that indicate a change in the level of economic activity on the ground at a high spatial resolution. This would help governments and policymakers in their plans and decision making to get India back on track of economic growth in post Covid scenario," he added.

The HFIs of the portal provides a range of data on multiple aspects of the economy, including fertilizer sales, trade in agricultural commodities, registration of new businesses, registration of different types of vehicles, digital transactions and payments and demand for wage labour under MGNREGA. Besides, it also facilitates the comparison of different high-frequency indicators for the current year (2020) with similar data for last year (2019), to provide clear evaluation and estimate of recovery. It is interesting to note that some of the important indicators of economic activity like new company registrations and quantity of fertilizers sold are performing better than last year within a month of relaxation of the lockdown norms, he said.

These HFIs are sourced from public agencies to the extent possible and are accessible on the portal. They are segregated into two groups – daily and monthly – based on their availability on the source sites.

The HFIs of JumpStartIndia@ISB initiative is hosted on the India Data Portal - one-stop open-access portal for journalists and citizens to access. Also, to interact with, and visualise public data related to agriculture and financial inclusion, besides other domains of national interest. India Data Portal brings this data on a common portal which allows ease of access and comparison.

He said that the JumpStartIndia@ISB is aiming to tie-up with state governments and agencies, to help and support them in their mission towards the recovery of economic growth across various sectors through the data made available on the portal.