How data can build a resilient future

This post is written by Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Department of ITE&C & Department of Industries & Commerce, Govt of Telangana; Shoko Noda, Resident Representative, UNDP in India; and Deepali Khanna, Managing Director, Asia Regional Office, The Rockefeller Foundation; with technical inputs from Swetha Kolluri, Head of Experimentation, Accelerator Lab, UNDP in India.

• The problem: A lack of preparedness to tackle crises are reversing hard-earned development gains and hindering progress on the SDGs.

• Why it matters: Health crises like COVID-19 impact the lives and livelihoods of millions of people worldwide.

• The solution: Data-driven innovations are offering new possibilities for strengthening preparedness to crises through anticipatory and resilient systems.

"Given that global temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees as compared to pre-industrial levels, building resilience across sectors has become an even more impending development priority."

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again reminded us of the fragility of our social, environmental and economic systems. It has dispelled any notions that a country can insulate itself from world crises. Meanwhile, the other global crisis - climate change - is having a devastating impact on life on earth. Extreme weather conditions, the loss of biodiversity, and increasing frequencies of natural calamities caused by climate change are very visible and offer a glimpse of what could be rampant and imminent, if we fail to act today. Given that global temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees as compared to pre-industrial levels, building resilience across sectors has become an even more impending development priority.

Data-driven approaches are offering new possibilities for anticipatory and resilient systems to tackle shocks and crises. Data-driven strategies can identify vulnerable populations and hotspots at the intersection of socio-economic-environmental facets, and can help develop better multi-dimensional poverty measures at local level. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are offering new avenues to uncover future trends, initiate early action and develop resilience in public systems.

For example, Telangana is the first state in India to launch an actionable AI policy framework to guide major policy decisions on food production, healthcare, and other areas. The state has deployed an AI-based solution that provides early warning signals on pest attacks to cotton farmers, thereby reducing crop loss due to pest attacks. This technology was initially rolled out to 150 villages in Telangana, leading to a more than 20% increase in profit for 7,000 farmers. This data-driven pest management system is being scaled up to improve the resilience of smallholder farmers.

"While data-driven approaches are very promising to build a more resilient world, they are not devoid of challenges."

Scaling up systems

At the national level, large scale data-driven applications like eVIN (electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network), supported by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and UNDP, are streamlining the vaccine supply chain. Implemented in 29,000 public health facilities across all 36 Indian states and Union Territories, the predictive power of eVIN helps in reducing stock-outs of vaccines by 80%. This platform has been repurposed to swiftly develop the CoWIN platform, a digital public good, supporting one of the largest vaccination drives in the world to combat the COVID crisis.

While data-driven approaches are very promising to build a more resilient world, they are not devoid of challenges. Sometimes, data exists in silos with multiple agencies at national and sub-national levels. Integrating data from diverse sources and making it interoperable is a key challenge. This is further amplified by challenges on data quality and inconsistent data standards. Safeguarding data privacy and personal data protection are important priorities in the data ecosystem.

Data collaboratives and digital public goods are emerging as innovative strategies for the non-profit sector to tackle some of these challenges. They provide transparent collaborative platforms that have appropriate protocols and data standards for multiple stakeholders to cooperate, contribute data, analyse it, and help leverage integrated data and insights.

Collaboration is key

The ”Data for Policy” initiative, facilitated by the Department of IT in Telangana and UNDP in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, is one such innovative collaborative effort shaping up in Telangana to strengthen the climate resilience of food systems. This is an important priority because climate change could reduce annual agricultural incomes in India by 15-18%, adversely impacting the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.

Applying a combination of open innovation, data-driven technologies and a community-centric bottom-up approach, the ‘Data for Policy’ initiative aims to strengthen climate resilience in agriculture programs and policies. Using a remote sensing-based digital public good platform and pattern detection algorithms, it helps identify farms that are resilient to extreme weather conditions as well as those farms which are highly vulnerable. The platform uses open-source technologies to facilitate analysis on climate resilience conducted by hundreds of young data scientists. It also enables citizen scientists to validate and share field insights on best performing farms as evidenced by data. Policy advocacy supported by data insights and community-led practices will help strengthen climate resilience in food systems policies of the state.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set food systems in India on the path of climate resilience by launching new crop varieties that are climate resilient and have higher nutrient content. At COP26, he emphasised the importance of climate-resilient infrastructure and pledged to make India’s carbon emissions net-zero by 2070. ‘Data for policy’ is an effort set in this direction of strengthening climate resilience in food systems using innovation and emerging technologies.

Fighting the climate crisis and building resilience is a long-term commitment and critical for future generations. The current crisis provides an opportunity to strategically rethink and revise the way we come together to enable data-driven transformation. India needs many more innovative and collaborative approaches for building resilient systems so that any shock, climatic or otherwise, does not set back the clock on sustainable and equitable development.

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