When I joined the sell-side as an analyst two decades ago, maintaining databases, converting them to good-looking charts, and writing a basic headline was a full-time (well paying) job. That drudgery is now history!
It has been exhilarating, over the last three years, to set up the Research desk at National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) which puts together out a wide number of products and analyses. One of which, now out in the public domain, is our Monthly Economic Report on India (MERI). Over many iterations, we built a robust system to track many aspects of macro, markets, investments, and infrastructure in our MERI which, as you will notice in the detailed pdf, is now in its thirty second monthly edition.
For those who track the Indian economy, data are now plentiful, digital, and trackable. With digitization, the basic data infrastructure of collection and dissemination is shaping up well. Yes, we need more data, more depth, more double-clicks, and more debates. What we have is powerful enough to build a granular tracker that gives a good understanding of the economy.
The exciting part of making MERI is that the process is now almost fully automated!
Whenever we see an interesting data source or a new release, we send it over to our friends at Thurro for its regular tracking and analysis. What you see in the final report are only around 80 pages of charts and analyses. We track many, many more pages of carefully designed charts and tables, and this number keeps increasing every month. We are now using AI to get us the first draft of headlines for our charts.
Why am I not very concerned about well-paying jobs being automated? Two reasons.
– If the basic document is ready “at the click of a button”, you can focus your time and attention on thinking about the implications. Indeed, the most time is now spent in thinking about the Executive Summary page – the one pager that captures our understanding of India’s economy in that month.
– With new sources of data and possibilities of deep analytics, we can move to deeper and more fun analyses. Remember our HeatMaps? We built a granular, geographical tracker of India’s economy using road tolls data. Many more such cool tools can now be built once the mind is freed up.
Do let us know if there are any #datasets that we should be tracking. If you have thoughts on any interesting analyses, please say!
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