CORE Dashboard: Transparent Governance Initiative in India
The buzz about Open Data and Open Governance has caught up many governments in the world.
As with any public initiative, Open Data involves some expenditure of public resources and effort. As such, public officials are often interested in the benefits of Open Data compared to the levels of required effort
— World Bank
In the United States, Martin O’Malley the former governor of Maryland has been the biggest advocate of performance tracking of government departments. With his idea of tracking the KPI’s (Key-performance indicators) to monitor and improve the efficiency of city governments, he setup Citistat in 2003. Since then, it became a highly successful system which got replicated in various different forms and at different levels in the US.
Across the world, 10 time zones ahead of US, Chief Minister of State of Andhra Pradesh(which happens to be my home state) in India is trying out something similar. Like Governor O’Malley set the benchmark for technology driven governance in the US. Mr. Chandrababu Naidu is setting the benchmark for India — currently the fastest growing large economy of the world. He started something called a CORE Dashboard — CM Office Realtime Executive Dashboard — which tracks the real-time* data related to various public departments.
Data related to employee attendance(bio-metric enabled), rainfall levels, ground water levels, energy production/consumption, taxation, forest rehabilitation, higher education, revenue collection, police, roads, water resources and a lot many other components are published on the dashboard. Not only did he create a system for real-time monitoring of various KPI’s of the State but he also made it public(http://core.ap.gov.in/). This would enable the people of the state to evaluate the governments performance and be informed about the progress. Also, it would help create an environment of accountability across various levels of the government.
On reaching out to a friend working at the Chief Minister’s office, I got to know that Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu actively monitors this data on a daily basis and is working hard to enhance it even further. I look forward to see this system being replicated at different levels of the government and create review mechanisms that would help make progress.
References:
[1] http://core.ap.gov.in/
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2007/04/pdf/citistat_report.pdf
[3] http://opendatatoolkit.worldbank.org/en/starting.html
