The Tamil Nadu government wants to approach the Centre to create a template for Union-to-State data connectivity and data sharing for better governance. A lot of data is not within the State’s reach — it is either with the Union government (like the IT department) or with the PSUs (oil marketing companies) — and there is no access to such data for the States, said Finance Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan.

The data could be unmarked, but at some level, it should be individual data. For instance, when the State government tried to do a third wave (Covid) preparation by overlaying vulnerable populations with antibody penetration and vaccine penetration, it could not get vaccine penetration data as CoWIN had it. After discussions, the Union government started to put the data at the city and district level, but there was not enough granularity to manage Covid response as data is required for every street and village and at the block level.

“We need a Union-to-State (for all States) methodology on accessing data for better governance,” he said in a discussion on Tamil Nadu’s Development Vision - from Regular Reforms to Transformations.

Integrated database

The State government is also planning an integrated database and data from all sources, including ration shops and voter IDs that are within the State’s control. It is also planning to do a door-to-door survey to have the huge database to create an integrated profile of every household and every citizen, the minister said in a discussion with S Narayan, Member, Economic Advisory Council and Tamil Nadu’s former finance secretary. The event was organised by the Chennai International Centre.

“One of the things I am going to focus on is improving the communication with the common man. The government’s communication with the voters is not going to be through traditional newspaper advertisements. We will leverage digital media and get the government’s message, data to the people and take feedback as aggressively as possible, and tailor our actions based on the feedback that we hear from the many. We always hear from the few, who have access to us. But we want to hear from the many. There are tools for us to get to the many, and if need be, bypassing the few,” he said.

Rajan said that he was worried about the interest payment taking away huge portion of revenue: it was 11-12 per cent earlier, but now nearly 20 per cent of all revenues. This includes the Union share of taxes and grants. This is not sustainable, and at that level, it is a death trap. The best way to fix this is to raise revenue a lot faster than your spending, he said.