Though it produces surplus food, India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world. While the production of rice and wheat has grown consistently since Independence, the growth in pulse production has stagnated. (Pulse refers to dried peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes.) As a result, India is facing a pulse problem.

Can we use data to solve India’s pulse problem? That’s the question we explored at the Fifth Elephant 2016, one of India’s premier data conferences.

Making every decision a data-driven decision is critical in sectors like agriculture, health, and education where well-planned initiatives have the power to literally change lives. However, it’s impossible to make these data-driven decisions without all of the relevant data — aggregated, cleaned, matched, and turned into insights. At SocialCops, we’ve built a platform to empower organizations to make these critical data-driven decisions more efficiently.

In our presentation at the Fifth Elephant, we delved into how our platform tackled India’s pulse problem by integrating data from 31 different data sets, covering 2000+ variables, to create 209 indicators. These indicators were then used to figure out where to target major investments for improving agriculture in India.