Data is the New Oil

 The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways earned ₹65 crore by providing access to the data stored in Vaahan and Sarathi databases. These databases contain data about the owner, make, model, etc of a vehicle. The data entry operators entering this data into the system would not have imagined the potential of the resource that he was generating. Some decades ago, companies would shred their papers or sell them to recyclers. The same papers would have fetched much more in recent times. 

Humble beginnings

More than a century ago, Jon Snow, an English doctor had mapped the residences of cholera patients to identify the polluted water pumps. His analysis of the data of the patients that he had attended to, helped find the source of the problem and hence eased solving the problems 

The genius idea of a store manager to start a Customer Loyalty programme as a bait to lock his customers helped him generate information about their purchases, frequency of purchases, season of purchases,etc. This information helped him target his customers when they were most likely to purchase.

The internet search engines, that once ranked search results alphabetically (urging companies like Amazon to look for names beginning with the letter ‘A’) started designing algorithms to understand and present the most relevant results on the first page of their search results. 

The dangerous turn

With the boom of the telecom sector and the emergence of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry changed gears in their marketing. The shift from a customer searching for a business in the Yellow Book to the business searching for a potential customer from the database of contact details that companies bought from data aggregators. Messages and calls, offering products and services, started beeping on the omnipresent mobile phones. People often wondered how these telemarketers had got their contact details, oblivious to the fact that these databases were available in the market for a few hundred rupees.

The virtual profiles of netizens, created from their activities on the internet - information on social media profiles, browsing patterns, history of shopping activities generated through a history of the stores they visited, banking transactions, etc helped advertising agencies target the most potential customers. 

Just as the field of data science was developing, promising huge potential of solving many mysteries of the world by analysing the underlying data, the 2015 Presidential elections in the USA brought forth one of the greatest social engineering hacks the world has ever seen. Motivated by the positive influence of social media in the previous elections and In a bid to understand and possibly influence citizens, candidates acquired the services of agencies that worked in the field of analysing data about netizens, The online activities of users on popular social media platforms were tracked. Every user had about 5000 data points that helped the agency analyse them. In the virtual world, the netizens were then fed content attempting to motivate them to vote for a particular candidate. This earned the firm, Cambridge Analytica, billions of dollars and showed the world the lucrative potential of data. 

Proofs of devices snooping on individuals had sensitised the world about the spies that they carried in their pockets. While oil caused wars in the past, data privacy issues had flared tensions between USA and China recently.

The economic potential of data had rightly aroused it’s comparison with oil.

Refining data

The true potential of oil is realised only after it is refined to yield different products. Similarly, data on its own is meaningless. It has to be mined and refined, to find usable information from it. Just like crude oil, different levels of refinement of the data yield different slices of information that can give deeper insights into the samples under study.

Driver of industries

Data has tremendous power.Data analysis can help find trends within the populace and give insights which would have otherwise been difficult to spot. The power of data has fuelled the Fifth Industrial Age where we have knowledge economies.

The GAFA quad (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) are the world’s largest companies and a major share of their revenues comes from then intangible data products rather than real products that are a user can touch and feel. 

Cambridge Analytica, a firm valued in billions of dollars, had reached the pinnacle only on the basis of data. What potential does data have that even the Government of India pays volunteers on the Digitize India portal for digitising scanned copies of documents? 

While oil ruled the Industrial Age, we are in an era where data pays. While oil caused wars in the previous century, data privacy issues have recently raised flares between USA and China. 

The Angel Face

Machines, after learning from previously fed data, can be designed to be smart enough to identify patterns within the data. And the larger the data, the more intelligent the system can be. Mathematical models made through machine learning can then help design an Artificial Intelligence system that can predict many things - from cancers to paths of cyclones. Mathematical models built after thorough study of data are now able to predict various weather phenomena. This helps mitigate during disasters

Better understanding of markets helped sellers optimise their advertising campaigns and thus save a lot of money. The brightest brains were working on making users click on the advertisements and the richest people were those who analysed data well. The richest people of the world now are no longer industrialists who made tangible products, but the ones who made intangible products from the data that they analysed. 

A better understanding of the implementation, by analysing the available data, helped the Indian government modify the Public Distribution System to Targeted Public Distribution System.

Opportunities for India

The Economic Survey 2018-19 called for a data that is “of the people, by the people and for the people”. If properly used, data can help us understand the nation better and hence formulate better policies. Having the second largest population, having a diversity of thoughts, beliefs, lifestyles, that is second to none, India has one of the best sources of data. Data about the movement of people, obtained through their timelines on Google Maps can help us understand the way our citizens move. This can help us plan for transport infrastructure accordingly. Data from the markets can be paired with the data from educational institutions to help design syllabus that is market oriented.

Creating a conducive environment 

One of the biggest concerns regarding data has been privacy. Suitable software firewalls and hardware walls are required. Enforcing data localisation will ensure that the payment data of Indian users stays within Indian borders. However, to make best use of this locally stored data, we need to develop the required Human Resource that can extract valuable information from it.  In addition to formal education, courses on data science, cyber security, etc offered through SWAYAM portal could help create trained professionals. Successful implementation of the National Electronics Policy and the National Software Policy will ensure that India joins the 5G bandwagon soon. In addition to communications between humans, 5G technology will usher in a new way of communication between devices. This could further leverage India Inc. by trickle down effects into related sectors of Information and Communications Technology. An increase in the number of devices used for generation, storage and analysis of data will increase the scope for entrepreneurs working in the sector of clean energy. Policies that regulate the use of private data and ethical collection and use of personal data will help gain the trust of participants and help use the beauty of artificial intelligence.

New ‘Oil’ fields

In data science, the larger the dataset, the larger the oil well, the smarter the system learns and the larger the amount of information it can yield. The large population of China contributed to the generation of large datasets from their economic activities in the growing tech based start ups in China. If data is the new oil, India & China is the new Saudi Arabia.

Modern computing relies only on 0’s and 1’s and thus the nation that gave the world a 0, with the increasing dataset living in it, has the potential to lead the world in the fourth Industrial Age.