India Data Portal (IDP) from The Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB) hosted a workshop in Kolkata on ‘Using Open Data for Creating & Presenting News Stories’. Dr. Ashwini Chhatre, Executive Director, BIPP, ISB graced the workshop.

Food and Agriculture, Union Budget, Election, Rural Development, Socio-Economic, Financial Inclusion, NSSO, and Government Schemes are just a few of the datasets available through the IDP. Over 30 High-Frequency datasets discuss economic indicators such as inflation, market, company registration, MNREGA, Covid related, and employment. These datasets come from the government, have been cleaned, and are neatly organized to make data use simple for everyone. This is a free portal that allows users to get visualizations or download clean data to use as needed.

On the back end, a highly skilled team is working to add new datasets and update existing ones on the portal. The goal is to promote fact-based news, policymaking, and research by popularising the use of data to support news stories.

The IDP, in collaboration with the GPC, hosted a workshop titled “Using Open Data for Creating and Presenting News Stories,” which was attended by media professionals from print, digital, and television.

The workshop focused on using data in journalism and how to present data using www.indiadataportal.com to create appealing visualizations. The sessions focused on getting to know the IDP, which houses a large number of processed and documented datasets from federal and state government agencies and departments. It also covered the IndiaPulse@ISB initiative’s high-frequency indicators, which were launched during COVID19 to track the health of the Indian economy. The IDP is a project aimed at improving government transparency and citizens’ rights to access and use public data relevant to major policy decisions.

In today’s world, data is critical, especially for journalists who need to write and provide fact-based information to their readers. The India Data Portal is a step in the right direction. It aspires to be a digital data diary for journalists, providing a single point of access to all types of data sourced from various government ministries. It will prove to be a valuable resource for the media community.

In six Indian languages – Hindi, Bengali, English, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu – IDP allows journalists, researchers, public policy makers, and academicians to access, interact with, and visualize data related to agriculture, financial inclusion, and rural development. In the future, they intend to expand to other vernacular languages.

For more information please email: idp@isb.edu

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