After every natural disaster, a detailed exercise is taken up in order to assess what is needed for the recovery effort and how to go about it. Normally, it is understood that while reconstruction of houses, roads, or electrical lines is taken up in a project mode and executed in a reasonable time, the restoration of the livelihoods of the survivors takes a longer time. A comprehensive ‘post-disaster need assessment’ task needs to take into account the livelihood challenges.The Fifteenth Finance Commission has provided a clear funding window of 30% of the overall resources of the National Disaster Risk Management Fund to address the challenges of recovery and reconstruction in a systemic manner by moving away from the earlier practice of managing each project on an ad hoc basis. From the earlier concept of “bringing it to pre-calamity condition”, we have moved to the idea of ‘building back better’ in our theory.Normally the phrase ‘disaster recovery’ with reference to data is used in the sense of large data with necessary computer hardware and software challenges, following a natural disaster or a human-induced drastic denial of service attack. Companies managing such data are required to have a disaster recovery plan in position.In the present article, we look at ‘disaster recovery’ in a different and narrow sense, with reference to official statistics and data as a credible resource in the government, after Covid-19. No doubt, public data is less tangible than physical losses or disruptions of economic activities, but nevertheless, it is an important public asset. Like all other public assets that get disrupted in a disaster, public data requires to be restored too.Representational image. Beneficiaries wait to receive the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination centre in New Delhi, Thursday, June 3, 2021. Photo: PTI/Manvender VashistAs the objective is to build back better, that should apply to the whole gamut of activities constituting governance. It needs to be noted that some practices – which were considered temporary – crept in during covid management but have not left even though Covid is no longer a global public health emergency. For example, public entry to government offices was stopped for some months. It is illustrative to see that it required the intervention of a high court (in this case, the high court of Odisha) to uphold the right of a grievance petitioner to enter the Secretariat at Bhubaneswar, the name of the premises having been changed ironically to Lok Sewa Bhawan.We may proceed to consider a few elements of official data in pre-Covid times and compare them with what we have now in the pubic domain, in order to understand the pace of recovery:1. While there is no legal compulsion, India has been conducting a decennial census since 1881. Indian census is the largest single source of a variety of statistical information regarding the different characteristics of the people of India. The data emerging out of the Census work helps planners, administrators, and academicians in doing their jobs more efficiently. It also helps businesses to plan and assess the penetration of markets. Thus, it is extremely useful as a tool in good governance.The last Census was done in 2011. The census exercise could not be done in 2021 because of the pandemic. Thus, clearly, the task of conducting census operations has been disrupted due to Covid-19. It has been reported in the media that Cenus may start after September 30, 2023, but official timelines for various phases of the Census exercise are yet to be announced.Also read: The Union Govt Is Yet to Release Data on Births and Deaths for 2021. Here’s What We Are Missing2. The amount of direct taxes collected and the number of persons from whom they are collected are matters of public interest. This data indicates the number of people who filed returns, their income ranges, and the details of taxes collected, every year by around October. For example, the data relating to the assessment year 2014-15 showed that 1.9 crore persons actually paid income tax, relating to total revenue of Rs.1.91 lakh crore. Similar data relating to the assessment year 2015-16 showed that 2.06 crore persons paid the tax, relating to total revenue of Rs 1.88 lakh crore. For 2016-17, the figures were 2.58 crore persons and Rs 2.3 lakh crore. For 2017-18, they were 2.64 crore persons and Rs 2.73 lakh crore. For the assessment year 2018-19, they were 3.29 crore persons and Rs 3.18 lakh crore. Each of these exhaustive reports is presented as data in about 80 pages every year. It should be noted that such data sets for the assessment years 2019-20, 2020-21, and 2021-22 are still not available in the public domain.3. Based on technical assistance from the World Bank and in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, NITI Ayog has been making an annual publication of the Health Index report, comparing the health sector performance of different states and Union territories. So far, four annual reports were brought out in February 2018, February 2019, December 2020, and December 2021. The fourth round report, covering the comparison between 2018-19 and 2019-20, makes an observation that it largely relates to the pre-Covid period and that it does not capture the impact of Covid-19 on health outcomes or any of the other indicators. The fifth round report of the index is yet to be released, though a year and a half has passed after the fourth one was released.4. We take pride in the fact that India adopted Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in March 2015. The progress in achieving this Framework is monitored by United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) through ‘Sendai monitor’ based on self-reporting by member countries. It is done by looking at progress in seven targets: mortality, people affected, economic losses, effects on critical infrastructure and service, disaster risk strategies, international cooperation, and disaster early warning and risk information. The first target has five indicators.Against each one of them, there is no data available from India’s side for the years 2021 and 2022. For the remaining six targets, it is being reported that it is “in progress, but not all entries validated”. Thus, clearly, there are gaps in reporting the data at a stage when globally we are halfway through the operation of this important Framework, which is valid from 2015 to 2030.5. The concept of the National Disaster Risk Management Fund (NDRMF) was started in India based on the recommendations of the 15th Finance Commission. It has four funding windows. There was understandably some delay in operationalising these windows immediately due to the pandemic. However, even after Covid has ceased to be a global public health emergency, the funding-window-wise physical and financial progress of NDRMF is yet to be presented in the public domain.A question may arise as to whether such gaps in public data are logically attributable to Covid-19 and not due to any other reason. The pandemic being such a widespread one that affected so many people across different sectors in so many ways, considering the fact that data emanates from the field level and the personnel working in the field were affected due to the pandemic, some delay in data updation was reasonable. But so much delay is not explicable easily, as we are now in June 2023.As all these instances show that these are not new tools in governance but the data was available in the public domain before Covid, it is not clear why there should be any other reason not to have this data. It is hoped that the gaps in data pointed out here and in other similar cases are rectified immediately. In case such wide gaps in public data are allowed to linger on further, it would point towards a disconcerting possibility that the concept of the state being accountable to the citizens was itself disrupted while the pandemic was on and that this damage is yet to be repaired. G.V. Venugopala Sarma is a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer.