October 11, 2022 
Media Contact: S.V. Subramanian
svsubram@hsph.harvard.edu
Harvard Geographic Insights Lab
(Cambridge, MA) India Policy Insights (IPI), the flagship project of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has developed a first-ever interactive policy dashboard for India’s 543 parliamentary constituencies (PCs). This public, online tool provides health, nutrition, and development data that specifically aligns with the political areas represented by India’s democratically elected Members of Parliament (MPs), who are responsible for overseeing effective policy implementation for their constituents.
The Data Gap
Up until now, readily available performance data has been lacking for the policy issues that specifically impact India’s PCs. While metrics are routinely collected at the district level for health indicators ranging from childhood anemia and stunting to delivery care for pregnant women, district boundaries do not cleanly correspond with PCs in all but a few exceptions. This misalignment inhibits MPs and other stakeholders from using existing data to accurately assess a PC’s progress in priority areas. As a result, policy dialogue and consitutent engagement is impeded by incomplete data at the PC level.
The Solution
To address this data gap, IPI has employed a novel methodology that leverages National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data to generate estimated measures for a range of health and development indicators. Clustering NFHS data by GPS coordinates instead of by districts and then mapping these new clusters onto current PC boundaries, IPI's team has created an unprecedented dashboard that geovisualizes over 90 key indicators on a color-coded map of India’s PCs, allowing users to view and compare PC performance across one or multiple selected states. Additionally, users can view an indicator’s most recent metric (2019-2021), or its change value over a 5-year period (2016-2021), as well as a list of current key Government of India (GOI) programs that are linked to each policy indicator.
Commenting on the significance of the new PC Policy Tracker, Harvard Chan School Professor of Population Health and Geography and Director of the Geographic Insights Lab S V (Subu) Subramanian says, “We hope that by creating value-added data at the PC-level where none currently exists, and visualizing these critical PC indicators for the first time, this new policy tool will greatly enhance the quality of political dialogue that MPs can have with their constituents around the issues that are most pressing in their communities.”
The PC Policy Tracker also provides a downloadable Factsheet for each PC, showing current (2021) performance measures for all indicators, as well as net change (2016 – 2021), and comparisons with national and state averages.
NFHS Policy Tracker for Parliamentary Constituencies: "Current" View (2021)
India Policy Insights is a Key Initiative of NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), the official policy design and innovation think tank for the Government for India.
Full Citation: Geographic Insights Lab. NFHS Policy Tracker for Parliamentary Constituencies. 2022. Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, Cambridge MA, USA. https://geographicinsights.iq.harvard.edu/nfhs-tracker-pc.
India Policy Insights (IPI) is a collaborative initiative of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, NITI Aayog, and the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) The initiative is being led by S.V. Subramanian, PhD, Professor of Population Health and Geography, Harvard University, and Honorary Senior Fellow, NITI Aayog. This research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, INV-002992.