12th year plan- Data Hackathon

The Government of India came up with a All India competition on 6th and 7th April'13 that allowed the common man to access the 12th 5yr Plan. The scope of the competition was that one can participate as a team of max 4. We were given the options to make mobile apps, infographics and short films.

We were given a fixed range of topics to choose from the 12th 5yr Plan. We chose the area of energy. It was further subdivided into more sections.

The experience of meeting people from varied field was exciting. We participated in the IISc Bangalore campus venue. The competition started with a small presentation by Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Sam Pitroda.

It was interesting hear and see them live. So all the event sites were web telecast simultaneously, so one could see all the participants across India. It is commendable to learn that the government has taken up such an initiative. Few of the reasons been:

• The 5year plans are quite vast and it touches upon all section of national interest. But interestingly it is not directly used by the common man. But it's importance lies in the fact that the plans are referred to see the progress of the nation and is consulted during budget preparation etc. All of which matters to the common man, yet they are aloof from the process and documents that the government uses to make budgets, schemes etc.
• The important fact is that the data which is used to make the plans are way too scattered and too many to understand. The government ends up giving the statistics and direct graphs, but there has been no effort in translating the numbers to words to held the common man understand the plans.
• Also speaking to a nation of over a billion people in multilingual is difficult.

We took part in the infographic competition. The competition lasted for 24 hours. It was difficult to narrow down our them from something as broad as energy to its sub-section and relate it to the bigger context of how those minute make a difference in the nation's GDP.
This is how the ideation process:

We documented the relation between the need for an energy efficient country and its effect on the GDP. Also the map helped us understand the challenges the nation faces in distributing power to a billion plus people.

The next chart were the wireframe ideation that helped us resolve how we will explain the story. It also helped us build on the hierarchy. That said,  due to some last minute glitch we could not do as planned So we have comparatively less information in the final poster. Here the first slide documents the basic questions that we are trying to answer.

This poster was made with the rural folks in mind. So in terms of scope this could be multilingual. The important aspect is that if this is printed into books, the infographic can easily be divided into two.

The challenging part was to scoop through datasets. There were multiple data set, some incorrect, some insufficient and some so vast that calculating would have taken all  our time. So after going through all the data sets, we decided to focus on the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana.

The final draft

Sourced from: pic.twitter.com/rhTKOl4DT7

The team
From left: Rasagy, Kenneth, Paulami