We are working towards a vision to build a data driven economy monitoring engine that will bring together economic time-series, longitudinal satellite data, and media reports, to improve the awareness of citizens on how economic policies get shaped, their effects, and give an overall state of the socio-economic lives of people as a result of policies and actions implemented in the Indian democratic framework. Our aim is to build a first version of GEM (Giant Economy Monitor) in India.

How economies work is poorly understood by most citizens – how corporate and political interlocks shape industrial policies or resource allocation, how political alignment of elected representatives affects the growth of their constituencies, how local and national inequality is changing over time, the impact of government welfare schemes, level of policing of trade mal-practices such as commodity hoarding or price manipulation, how media ownership influences its bias, whether social media helps level mass media bias or amplifies echo chambers, are aspects that if understood by citizens can help strengthen the democratic frameworks to make the world a better place for everybody. Representing the functioning of the economy in simple terms in hard – data collection from many sources, data mining to detect relationships based on state of the art in economic/financial/political models, and making it accessible to people in contextual ways – is what we aim to achieve.