Putting Data to Work

Atlan is helping governments and companies manage and analyse data to achieve better and faster results.

- Varsha Meghani

For all the talk about data being the new oil, Prukalpa Sankar has a slightly different view. “Data can be chaos,” says the 27-year-old. She would know. Fresh out of college, she set up SocialCops along with Varun Banka in 2012. The intelligence startup made order out of chaos by harnessing data to solve civic challenges. For instance, they helped bring LPG connections to 70 million below-poverty-line women under the Ujjwala Yojana scheme by mapping every one of India’s 6.4 lakh villages, and adding information like population and income level. They built Disha, India’s national data platform that brought data from 42 government schemes and 20 ministries onto a single dashboard. And they partnered with the United Nations to help countries, including Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea, draw on data to track their progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

But as Sankar and Banka, 28, dealt with data to address these problems, they realised their biggest bottleneck was internal. “Data teams are one of the most diverse ones,” says Sankar. At SocialCops, for example, a single team comprised individuals with complementary skills, from data scientists and machine learning engineers to economists, data analysts and business managers. “Each person had a different DNA, skillset and way of working.”

These led to cracks in the system. An engineer complained that the client’s problem statement wasn’t properly communicated to her, an analyst inserted an incorrect variable in the analysis, or a data scientist did not tell the team that some parts of the data were patchy.