Data and Journalism: Panel discussion at India Data Portal launch

Launched in Delhi on January 31, 2020, #IndiaDataPortal (https://indiadataportal.com/) is a project incubated at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, an institute within the Indian School of Business. Developed by Gramener, a data science consulting firm, IDP is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It aims to be a “one-stop open access portal for public data and visualisations in India”.

IDP’s launch included a panel discussion on “Data and Journalism”, which was moderated by Newslaundry’s Abhinandan Sekhri. The panel comprised Ritu Kapur, co-founder of the Quint; Avik Saha, one of the founding members of Swaraj Abhiyan; Anand S, CEO of Gramener; and Avik Sarkar, visiting associate professor at the Indian School of Business.

The conversation started with Avik Sarkar explaining why the IDP team chose to collect data on the agricultural sector as a starting point. “This is a sector which needs a lot of work, and about 50 percent of the population of our country is employed in this sector,” he said. “Today, agriculture is a sector that has a lack of credible advisory services compared to other sectors, and for that we need information available to people on the ground.”

Ritu said IDP is vital for journalists today. “No news organisation currently has pockets deep enough to do large-scale surveys,” she pointed out. “We need credible data considering the amount of under-reporting and misreporting that has come to the fore.”

Abhinandan asked the panel why reporting on agriculture has increased over the past few years. “I think it happened because of us — the consumers of news — and not because of news agencies or media houses,” Avik Saha responded.

Discussing how data can be misused, Anand said, “Data can be used as a tool for confirmation…The problem is people only look for proof in data, and not for disproof.”

The panel also discussed the credibility of data, the future of data-based journalism, the importance of agriculture in the media, and the limitations of using data to tell a story.

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