{"id":886,"date":"2013-08-15T15:00:12","date_gmt":"2013-08-15T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.neependra.net\/?p=886"},"modified":"2013-08-15T15:00:12","modified_gmt":"2013-08-15T15:00:12","slug":"policy-hackathon-iim-bangalore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/2013\/08\/15\/policy-hackathon-iim-bangalore\/","title":{"rendered":"Policy Hackathon @IIM Bangalore"},"content":{"rendered":"

On datameet group I saw a mail regarding the Policy Hackathon<\/a>, which was pre-event for\u00a0<\/a><\/span>8th Annual International Conference on Public Policy and Management at IIM Bangalore <\/a>\u00a0on 10 – 11 August’13. I have been to hackathons earlier but not sure what would be the policy hackathon. Anyways I thought to give it a try. I dropped a mail to the datameet <\/a>to see if I can someone\u00a0would be interested to join me. I got few replies and we made a team.<\/p>\n

The event started 10th at 3 PM. The first thing we need to do is to have the team name.\u00a0We did not thought about it. So I suggested Shadowfax and finalized it.\u00a0After the initial\u00a0briefing\u00a0we were given the census data <\/a>from 2001 and 2011, NSSO <\/a>data form 2002, 2004-05, 2006-07, 2009-10 district wise. We need look at the census data and see what has changed over time and the support it with NSSO<\/a> data. After \u00a0that we need to relate that to the government policy. If there is any existing policy then we need to check how it performed and any changes that we can suggest. But if can’t find policy then what policy we can suggest.<\/p>\n

As soon as I unzipped the data, I saw one of the largest dataset I played with. For the first hour I had no idea what to look for. As some of the team-mates came late and went\u00a0in-out between, some time was lost. As policy hackathon was all new to us, we had no idea where to start. But we started discussing\u00a0different\u00a0topics like health, education, \u00a0migration, sanitation etc. Rest of the evening on 10th just went up discussing some random\u00a0ideas to see if can see some relation between two different sector like education and healthcare. All these discussions were fun and very productive. In the end we decided that\u00a0we want to do something with education but details were not decided.<\/p>\n

After coming back home I thought of looking back into the data and see if I can find something interesting. With further exploration I decided to check what percentage of the monthly expenditure\u00a0people are spending on education and health-care. I worked almost all night to write R code to see this\u00a0behavior\u00a0across different states. I noticed that though people’s per month expenditure has not gone much up but share of education and health-care has gone up \u00a0significantly. What does this mean ?
\n– If the expenditure on education and health-care has gone up then expenditure on other items would come down?<\/em>
\n – Are people saving less because of this ?<\/em><\/p>\n

On next day 11th August I discussed my finding with Arnab<\/a> and he suggested that may be I should \u00a0look at the how does\u00a0tuition\u00a0fees of the school\/colleges has gone up during those period. I got following after I plotted that for Karnataka.<\/p>\n

\"urban\"<\/a><\/p>\n

mpce = Monthly per capita expenditure<\/p>\n

urbanEE = Total Education expenditure in Urban area<\/p>\n

urbanPE = private tutor\/ coaching centre in Urban area<\/p>\n

urbanTE = Education expenditure for tuition and other fees (school, college, etc.) in Urban area<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From above we see that because of rise in\u00a0tuition\u00a0fee, expenditure in education has gone up till \u00a02007. What is\u00a0surprising\u00a0is that even though after 2007 the\u00a0tuition\u00a0fee has not gone up, we still \u00a0see rise in overall education expenditure. This trend is same for urban and rural area. So,\u00a0some other kind of expenditure in education might have caused this. Looking at more closely\u00a0we found the post 2007, the expenditure on the private coaching\/tutor has gone up. So now\u00a0people are paying high\u00a0tuition\u00a0fee and spending in private coaching as well. The new graph look\u00a0like following:-<\/p>\n

\"urban_withPE\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Is this good for overall society ?<\/p>\n

The above graphs is just for Karnataka. It is very easy to look above data for other states with “R” :-<\/p>\n

–\u00a0install.packages(“shiny”)<\/p>\n

– shiny::runGist(‘6217186’)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It would open up a interactive web-UI.<\/p>\n

So this was our final submission for the hackathon competition.<\/a> We were not able find a relevent\u00a0policy and was not able to coin new policy due to lack of time. But to my surprise we were selected for the final\u00a0round and invited to present it on 13th August in front of judges. The entire team of judges for the Hackthon\u00a0was Varsha Joshi, (Director Census Operation, GoI)<\/a>Sridhar Pabbisetty (Policy Consultant, Govt. of Karnataka)\u00a0<\/a>Hema Swaminathan (IIM Bangalore<\/a>),\u00a0Arnab Mukherji (IIM Bangalore)<\/a>.Though we gave our best shot but because of lack of policy statement we were not able to make it \u00a0for any rewards.<\/p>\n

I anyway need to at IIM on 13th, so I decided to attend the entire day event. I attended Plenary Address\u00a0by Professor Gita Sen<\/a>, which was about human development. She mentioned that India has not spent much\u00a0on the human development like in education as compared to other countries. This raised a question to me :-<\/p>\n

From the data I showed earlier it is clear that people are spending thier own money to get education. Shouldn’t the government make policies to make the sure that teachers in the college\/schools teach properly so that student should have to go the private coaching\/tutor. The money spent on private coaching can be saved and used some where else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The other sessions I attended on:-<\/p>\n

– Affordable Housing (Ideas from the ground)<\/p>\n

– ICTs as Infrastructure – Through the\u00a0Gender Prism –\u00a0Anita Gurumurthy (IT for Change)<\/p>\n

– Rural Women Journalists Take on New\u00a0Media Shalini Joshi (Khabar Lehariya<\/a>)<\/p>\n

– The Janaagraha-Brown Citizenship Index:Rationale, Bangalore Study and Plans<\/p>\n

– Public Problem Solving<\/p>\n

At the end of day I saw\u00a0documentary\u00a0about group of women who created all ladies Jamaat <\/a>(Jamaat is caste based group\u00a0which can legal action in the community) to challenge Jamaat which were only run the males. It was very\u00a0inspiring.<\/p>\n

I had learnt a lot of new things in last few days. I got new perspective to look at things.<\/p>\n

Even after \u00a066 years\u00a0independence\u00a0we have not progressed as we should have been. Somehow this can be co-related to\u00a0to policy that has been chosen by our leaders. To have a impact on large scale, right policy is needed. I’ll try\u00a0to dig more into policies using different datasets in coming months.<\/p>\n

Happy policy hacking!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On datameet group I saw a mail regarding the Policy Hackathon, which was pre-event for\u00a08th Annual International Conference on Public Policy and Management at IIM Bangalore \u00a0on 10 – 11 August’13. I have been to hackathons earlier but not sure what would be the policy hackathon. Anyways I thought to give it a try. I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,24],"tags":[76,119,122],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-analysis","category-geek","tag-data-analysis-2","tag-opendata","tag-public-policy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neependra.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}