This blog was originally published in October 2017, then a few stats were updated in July 2018 as the platform expanded.

“DISHA is a crucial step towards good governance through which we will be able to monitor everything centrally.

It will enable us to effectively monitor every village of the country.”

– Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India

India took a definitive step towards data-driven decision making in governance today, and we are honored to be empowering this breakthrough with our data intelligence platform. Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the DISHA Dashboard, a data intelligence platform that will provide all information to the elected representatives to track the performance of all the major flagship schemes of the different central ministries in their respective districts and constituencies.

This is the first time that dynamic data from 20 different ministries will break silos to come together in one place, bringing in accountability to a budget of over Rs. 2 lakh crore spent on 42 welfare schemes annually. In the first round, data can be accessed for six schemes of three ministries under 17 sections, yielding no less than 151 crore data points. MPs and MLAs can access the dashboard in both Hindi or English, and across any of the three platforms – web, mobile or tablet.

With the help of the DISHA Dashboard, the District Development Coordination and Monitoring Committee (DISHA) can access data at the level of a state, district, even sub-district – down to Gram Panchayat – to plan and evaluate time-bound development of the districts with regards to a scheme, such as Swachh Bharat Mission, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, among others.

Watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi share why he believes that DISHA is a crucial step towards good governance.

Until now, a unified database for all information across ministries and departments for districts and villages was lacking, making it difficult for government officials and elected representatives to correctly plan development at the local level. The biggest challenge in unifying data has been the lack of a common definition for an administrative geography; ministries report data based on their own unique geography hierarchy. For example, all rural development schemes operate at the gram panchayat level, National Health Mission at the Block/sub-district level, and Ujjwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana at the district level.

Recently, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj launched the Local Government Directory to create an updated database to ensure that all government bodies are mapped to the constituting geographies so that a complete and final database of all administrative geographies is available at one place.

“SocialCops has used advanced data transformation and algorithms to enable the DISHA Dashboard to show the most granular data for all schemes across both administrative and electoral boundaries,” says Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder, SocialCops. The dashboard will arm district committees with information to compare and analyze data even at the Gram Panchayat level — and help them identify what is stalling processes and how can these be addressed.

India is following the global trend of hard data, rather than opinions of influence, informing governance. Increasingly, city, state and national governments are making use of data to draw insights and take transparent decisions.