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The Indian School of Business (ISB) launched the portal https://indiadataportal.com/jsi of its prestigious project JumpStartIndia@ISB on Thursday. The portal brings together several high-frequency indicators (HFIs) of India’s Economic Recovery to a common platform to enable a meaningful and real-time analysis of patterns of economic recovery.  

The portal will provide journalists, citizens, and policymakers direct visual insights into important indicators at daily or monthly frequency in near-real-time and at district or state-level.

Speaking at the launch Prof Ashwini Chhatre, Executive Director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business said: “As the economy recovers from the pandemic-induced lockdown, we are identifying and monitoring selected parameters that indicate change in the level of economic activity on the ground at a high spatial resolution. This would help governments and policy makers in their plans and decision making to get India back on track of economic growth in post COVID scenario.”

The HFIs provide a range of data on multiple aspects of the economy, including fertilizer sales, trade in agricultural commodities, registration of new businesses, registration of different types of vehicles, digital transactions and payments and demand for wage labour under MGNREGA. The portal will support the media in their reportage about country’s economic status and path ahead by providing this data across various indicators and segments. It also facilitates comparison of different high frequency indicators for the current year (2020) with similar data for last year (2019) to provide clear evaluation and estimate of recovery. It is interesting to note that some of the important indicators of economic activity like new company registrations and quantity of fertilizers sold are performing better than last year within a month of relaxation of the lockdown norms.” 

These HFIs are sourced from public agencies to the extent possible and are accessible on the portal. They are segregated into two groups – daily and monthly – based on their availability on the source sites. The daily updated indicators include MGNREGA jobs and expenditure, fertilizer sales, economic value of agricultural commodities traded at mandis, digital payments, Aadhar authentications and electricity supply. The list of monthly indicators includes company registrations, e-way bills, GST collections, foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment, railway freight for essential goods, and vehicle registrations by type.

 The HFIs for JumpStartIndia@ISB initiative are hosted on the India Data Portal - one-stop open-access portal for journalists and citizens to access, interact with, and visualize public data related to agriculture and financial inclusion, in addition to other domains of national interest. India Data Portal brings this data on a common portal which allows ease of access and comparison. 

The JumpStartIndia@ISB aims to tie-up with state governments and agencies to help and support them in their mission towards recovery of economic growth across various sectors through the data made available on the portal.

Please see link to the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gb8hxzzMfNU

For more information, please email: idp@isb.edu