Organizing economic and financial data with Ashutosh Datar

The Rainmatter Podcast

IndiaDataHub is a data portal that aggregates and provides insights on economic and financial data. Though the government, regulators, and other systemically important institutions publish tons of data, it's highly unstructured and messy. Ashutosh had long dealt with the issue of messy data and based on his experiences, he started IndiaDataHub started as a passion project while he was working as an economist at IIFL. It later became a startup. Ashutosh and his team also publish an annual publication called The Data Book which gives rich insights on various aspects of the Indian economy. This year's edition gives you a bird's-eye view of the Indian economy across various parameters like demographics, agriculture, industry, trade, banking, capital markets, and much more.

So I caught up with Ashutosh to talk about the backstory of IndiaDataHub and also discuss some of the highlights from The Data Book. In this conversation, we talk about:

1. How Ashutosh became an economist
2. How IndiaDataHub started
3. What could disrupt IndiaDataHub
4. The quality of Govt data and the move toward open data
5. Opportunities in making sense of data
6. Alternative data
7. Learnings building IndiaDataHub
8. The state of the Indian economy post-COVID19, formalisation, household savings and other highlights from The Data Book.

This was an absolutely fascinating conversation and we hope you enjoy this as much as we did recording it.

You can purchase your copy of The Data Book—State Of India here.

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