Collecting data on COVID-19 health and economic effects from across India’s poorest states

As India aims to slow COVID-19 with physical distancing and alleviate hardships to the poor, policymakers face difficult choices: how can the most lives be saved without causing more economic and other hardships? Policymakers and development partners currently lack high-quality data at scale that is necessary to make informed decisions on physical distancing measures, economic relief, communication strategies, and other policy responses.

From April through July 2020, our Data on Demand infrastructure is being leveraged to collect district-level data from 27 of the highest-need districts across eight states in India, representative of 60 million people. We will remotely collect rapid, high-quality data on policymakers’ most pressing concerns, including COVID19 related awareness, health practices, economic impacts, migration, consumption patterns, and more. Our full survey tool for round 1 is available here. We will collect four rounds of data and are targeting 50 percent female respondents.

Our large-scale data collection will support policymakers in India to make rapid course-corrections and target resource allocation to the geographies and populations most in need.

This project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.