By Imlisanen Jamir
The Government of Nagaland’s month-long training programme on data analytics for state officials arrives wrapped in the reassuring language of modern governance. “Evidence-based decision-making” is a phrase that sounds clean, rational, almost inevitable. Who, after all, would argue against decisions guided by facts?
And yet, Nagaland’s governance crisis has never been caused by a lack of data.
The state is already rich in numbers. Census figures map population shifts and literacy rates. Health surveys record maternal mortality, nutrition gaps and disease prevalence. Education data tracks enrolment, dropouts and infrastructure shortages. Departmental reports stack up year after year, bound, filed, and quietly forgotten. The problem has not been collection, but consequence. Data is gathered, acknowledged, sometimes even admired—and then bypassed.
Training officials to analyse data is useful. It sharpens tools. It modernises vocabulary. But it does not confront the harder truth: many policy decisions in Nagaland are not made in the absence of evidence, but in defiance of it. Projects are approved because they are politically convenient, not because they respond to demonstrated need. Budgets are allocated along familiar lines, not empirical ones. Priorities are often settled before the first dataset is opened.
In such a system, analytics risks becoming cosmetic. Dashboards can be built while outcomes remain unchanged. Evidence can be cited selectively, like scripture, to justify what was already decided. The danger is not incompetence, but comfort—the comfort of saying the right words without disturbing old habits.
If data is to matter, it must be allowed to disagree with power. It must be able to say that a road is unnecessary, that a scheme is failing, that a department’s priorities are misaligned with reality. More importantly, when data does say these things, the system must be obliged to respond. Otherwise, analysis becomes theatre.
The emphasis on inter-departmental data sharing and treating information as a “state asset” is welcome. But assets imply ownership, and ownership implies accountability. Who is responsible when outdated figures guide policy? Who answers when data-backed warnings are ignored? At present, the system provides no clear answers. Decisions made without evidence carry no cost. Decisions that contradict evidence carry no explanation.
True data-driven governance begins where discomfort starts. It requires departments to justify proposals with verifiable datasets, not assumptions. It requires policy notes to state clearly what evidence was used—and, just as importantly, what evidence was set aside. It requires periodic reviews that measure outcomes against the data that supposedly informed them.
Most of all, it requires a shift from ritual to reckoning. From collecting information to acting on it. From citing numbers to being constrained by them.
Without this shift, capacity-building programmes risk becoming another annual entry in the administrative calendar—earnest, well-intentioned, and ultimately harmless. Nagaland does not need more data. It needs a governance culture where ignoring data is no longer the easiest option.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
