Applying Big Data Analytics in Governance to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in India

One of the chief obligations of governance in democratic countries is creating and co-creating value in public service delivery, the process of which is undertaken in a participatory manner so as to ensure an accountable, responsive, and transparent ecosystem (Good Governance, The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific—UNESCAP). To translate these good governance ideologies into practical implementation, it is necessary to ensure the achievement of development targets defined as Sustainable Development Goals such as no poverty, zero hunger, and complete gender equality (SDGs, UNDP, 2015). Further, to achieve these development targets in a sustained manner, converged governance efforts are required at the grassroots, which in turn would inevitably result in the generation of continuous baseline data. This colossal amount of data thus generated at the grassroots when coupled with unstructured citizens’ data generated through other digital devices holds immense potential to revolutionize governance processes by providing a foundation for data-backed decision making. Hence, such structured baseline data and unstructured citizens’ data must be continuously combined and analyzed by application of big data analytics and other emerging ICTs (information and communication technologies).