The felicity with which Prukalpa Sankar articulates her vision for SocialCops, the data technology venture she co-founded, makes it easy to forget she’s 23 years old.

The two-year-old start-up, which raised its first round of capital worth $320,000 last year from venture capital firm 500 Startups and angel investors, promises to be a real game-changer for those trying to understand some of the biggest problems afflicting India’s hinterland.

“It’s a little silly that we can find within two minutes an Italian restaurant selling, say, food priced under ₹500, but find it far harder to understand the specific needs of a village or household to be able to design a healthcare budget,” says Sankar, a chemical and biomolecular engineering graduate from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, who launched the company together with her college-mate Varun Banka (also 23).

SocialCops’ USP is in exposing granular information and trends rather than the bulk macro-data that most researchers and non-profits contend with at present.

It does this by collating the information gathered by its partners — Unicef, State governments, the Rural Development Ministry, philanthropic trusts and 120 NGOs including Deepalaya and Pratham — using customised data collection tools.

It then helps make sense of the data through dashboards and visualisations, to aid decision-making.

“For instance, government data today can provide the number of toilets in a particular village school. It cannot determine if they are functional. Through the field workers of our partners, we add specific questions to their surveys. The data collected is then made more consumable for, say, a district education officer deciding his annual budgetary allocations,” explains Sankar, who grew up in Hyderabad and previously had a stint at Goldman Sachs.

The data collected is pledged to be open-source, so that it can be deployed for subsequent projects and decision-making and becomes a part of SocialCops’ data grid.

Infrastructure costs — usually a tablet computer for the field representative — is borne by the partner institution, and clients are charged based on whether they consume raw data or the analytics provided by the company, as also the granularity and breadth of the information collected.

To illustrate how micro-level data can help identify unique rural needs, and thereby tailor targeted policy programmes, Sankar highlights two ongoing projects.

In Andhra Pradesh’s Vijayawada district, SocialCops has partnered with the administration and a private trust to frame a development plan for all 264 villages by using 150 data points collected from every household by 1,000 volunteers. A mini-census of sorts, the programme will help families access various services.

“It’s a lot like how Google targets consumers with ads. We tagged all social sector entitlements — Government schemes, private sector solutions — through this micro-target approach via the data points. This exercise then takes place at the village level, sub-district level and so on,” she says.

The company also partnered with the Indian Health Action Trust to identify the root causes for maternal mortality in rural Uttar Pradesh. Nurses and workers armed with targets are visiting every primary healthcare centre (PHC) in the State to collect data. Hence, each centre is tagged and the conditions of the infrastructure and the quality and number of personnel (doctors, nurses) noted. Nurses are evaluated to determine how well-versed they are with the procedures required for a successful delivery and the safety of the mother.

“The most interesting element in the project is where our partners assess the steps of the delivery, which we model to understand at which stage a complication can actually arise. It helps us understand where a problem comes up and which steps in the process are being missed and why,” Sankar says, hopeful of coming up with a template to understand the actual reasons, and not just the broad generalities, associated with maternal mortality.

Ultimately, in a technology-driven world, SocialCops aims to empower stakeholders with value-additions in their efforts to resolve the many problems facing an emerging economy. It was her time in finance, Sankar says, that helped bring about this realisation.

“When Varun and I were working in financial organisations completely run by data, we realised that in areas of our lives which are the most crucial, such as education and healthcare, things are being driven by a hunch or hypotheses based on data that is not entirely reliable... (now) we have a chance to build something that people respect,” she says.

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