Survey data is treasure trove for govt

Hyderabad : The data generated from the Intensive Household Survey has turned out to be a treasure trove of valuable information for policy makers in the government to help in fine-tuning the developmental programmes.

'It contained such a vast data that any department now can plan programmes with accuracy and with confidence,' senior officials of planning department said. The collated data would be supplied to all departments so that they can effectively use it for effective and targeting their schemes.

Panchayat Raj Department Principal Secretary Raymond Peter is overseeing the software part of the project with the help of National Informatics Centre (NIC).

A top official of the planning department, which has funded and organized the survey, said that the programmes were designed in such a way that with just a click of the mouse, the departments can get the information they want.

'For example, the rural development department can get statistics of aged persons, widows and physically handicapped, who are eligible to get pensions. The survey data will help the department to estimate how much money they need for a given programme,' the official explained.

Society for Eradication of Rural Poverty (SERP) officer Murali said that about 80 categories of information would be available from the household database. He said that almost all the departments could get needed information.

Murali said that from the survey database, revenue department could get the number of landless people, consumer affairs department could get number of ration cards in use and municipalities could get information on number of taps, number of houses without taps.

'Even a village panchayat can get information about the number of houses and amount of property tax that could be collected,' he said.

The survey data would also be useful in crosschecking the information. The mandal revenue officers who are responsible to give various categories of certificates to citizens would crosscheck the application with the CHS data before sending the team for physical verification.

'The data would help us as guide to formulate programmes and to crosscheck,' he said. The officials are now busy entering the data into the computers and this would take about 15 days and it would be put in the public domain by September 5. Once the data is fed to the computers, the departments could go into it and could extract whatever information they need.