A Billion Consents

Day after each passing day, analysis and opinions pouring in India around Covid-19 seems to be sensational, politically motivated and numerically challenged. India is a mega diverse sub continent. During emergencies like these, along with lockdown and economic strategies there needs to be data/analytics strategies that take these mega complexities head on.

How about coming to your balcony this Saturday at 8 pm, to give a 1 time universal consent to the Prime minister of India from your mobile phone? Each data byte of your personal information through your consent will power data scientists working on his behalf to create something substantial as a public good.

Imagine, if we can time series and geotag simple info like Covid-19 recovered and dead person names in a public database and make records unique by associating epic id from voter roll data and or Aadhaar. Of course all hashed, anonymised and only aggregates made public. From names we can also drill down with certain confidence useful meta data like caste, religion etc. From geotags we can overlay census meta data (getting some more socio economic indicators)

Armed with such a database imagine the drill downs/analysis that could be publicly made available to Indians and set an example to the rest of the world ! People deserve to get more insights and custom trends around the factors that put them at a fatal risk. This kind of information saves lives and can inform nuanced post-Covid recovery strategies.

It's frustrating that inspite of technology and data availability, basic information that can be trusted is not available to the public. This is data poverty. Things need not be this broken! What frustrates me even more is that during election times all kinds of psephologists and analysts come forth to slice and dice data displaying their full entrepreneurial, engineering and innovation chops for a few votes more.

Why not trigger a call to action to build a publicly consumable live India Covid dashboard. Signed by the Govt of India. Powered by a billion consents !