India is one of the countries where getting access to public data is very difficult. Through RTI has enable the citizens to file an application and get data, the scale to which it can be used to get national level data is limited indeed.
Even straight forward data such as rainfall data is not available to public. Recently IMD agreed to put up last five years data in public domain.
Data plays a crucial role in research, policy making, planning and implementation of public works etc. In India, most of the time data is either generated by a private institute or an international institute. Very few government websites provide current and relevant data to public. Department of Drinking Water Supply is one of the few government departments putting up data for public use.
The next challenge with data is its presentation. Providing people with raw data is good, but everybody will not be in a position to interpret data. Data, if presented in the right format, can overturn laws and policies. One such effort has been enabled by Google’s Fusion Tables. Now that google has solved the problem of visualisation, we Indians should get back to the business of collecting data and making it publicly available.
Below is a very good representation of Total Renewable Freshwater Supply across the world. If you can observer, India is not doing bad. China is doing even better. But both India and China will soon be water stressed countries since we are not harvesting the rains to the best of our efforts. I am sure that once we overcome the challenge of collecting data and its visualisation, we would have to solve the greatest problem of humanity – convincing fellow humans to act in the right direction