INFUSION – looking ahead beyond April 2023

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Hello everyone and thank you for dropping by GregPostdocs!

I’m just en route* from Sheffield to London to attend Suneetha Kadiyala’s inaugural lecture at LSHTM: ‘Finding joy in mess: The art and science of embracing complexity in global nutrition research’ (congratulations Professor Kadiyala!). I thought this might be a good time to write a small update, particularly with regards to some of the developments on the INFUSION project over the past couple of weeks (and particularly with regards to some of the spatial/geographical information we are hoping to use).

Brief INFUSION update

We have now just entered the formal formative phase of the INFUSION project! Over the next six months we will be working closely with our partners at MicroSave Consulting (MSC), the Indian School of Business (ISB) and the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) to conduct a series of focused data collections and analyses to help set the scene for the study.

For example, despite our month in Bihar earlier this year, we still have much to learn about the functioning of the Government of Bihar’s Food Security Fund (FSF). Exactly how does the group procurement scheme interact with established markets, in terms of the sourcing and payment for rice, pulses, and oils? What are some of the main barriers women face when entering/participating in the scheme? How might the FSF start to be redesigned to enable the procurement of perishable, nutrient-dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, and animal-source foods (and what would be the costs and trade-offs of doing so)?

In fact, as useful as our inception visit was in terms of starting to develop a close partnership with key decision-makers in the Bihar Government’s Rural Livelihood Promotion Society (“JEEViKA”), it has proven to be a classic case of the more you begin to know, the more questions begin to arise!

With the inception week wrapped up in late-February, we hope to get back out to Bihar soon to begin the formal formative research!

GeoSadak, AgMarkNet & SHRUG

As mentioned above, multiple analyses will be focused on diving-deep into the large volumes of secondary datasets pertaining to various segments of the food system in Bihar (i.e., the broad collection of production, transport, processing, marketing, storage, and disposal activities which move food from farm to fork). There has been a manifold increase in the availability of publicly-accessible datasets over the past few years, with three of my personal favourites being the GeoSadak database, the AgMarkNet portal, and The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Platform for India (SHRUG):

  • GeoSadak: with ‘sadak’ meaning ‘road’ in Hindi, this dataset has been developed by the Ministry of Rural Development (Government of India), as part of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (Prime Minister’s Rural Road Scheme). Within the ‘open data’ portal, GIS shapefiles mapping the locations of roads, agricultural facilities (e.g., market and storage facilities) and individual ‘habitations’ (hamlets and ‘tolas’ below the revenue village level) can be downloaded for 29 of India’s states and union territories. Despite data completeness varying between states, GeoSadak is an impressive dataset (to say the very least), and more can be learnt about its development from the talks here and here by Harsh Nisar, the lead data scientist at the Ministry of Rural Development.
  • AgMarkNet: The Government of India’s flagship market information system (Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India), the platform reports on daily arrivals (i.e., quantities) and prices from over 2500 markets across the country. Formal market monitoring fell by the wayside following the repeal of the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act across Bihar in 2006. However, and importantly for INFUSION, efforts led by MicroSave Consulting in conjunction with the Government of Bihar are reviving price information reporting activities in 100 wholesale markets across the state. Explore the dropdown lists next to the ‘Search’ bar to start downloading price data for everything from Ajwan seeds (carrom seeds) to Yam!
  • SHRUG: The data platform I am least familiar with, the team at the Development Data Lab have digitised and spatialised various India-wide datasets, ranging from 2011 census data, 2000-2019 all-India forest coverage, and even constituency-wise records of politicians who have submitted “affidavits documenting assets, liabilities, and open criminal charges”!
(Main) QGIS screenshot of the OpenStreetMap basemap of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, overlaid with the District Rural Roads Plan (DRRP) layer of GeoSadak in black and the ‘roads’ layer of OpenStreetMap as sourced from the GeoFrabrik repository in orange. (inset-left) The attribute table of the GeoSadak layer, including the road name, road owner (e.g., Rural Works Department) and road category (e.g., Rural Roads – Track).

One slight catch of having such large quantities of data available is the seemingly endless analysis possibilities. As such, we are currently having to prioritise and think quite carefully in INFUSION about how best to integrate such datasets, for example, to inform our sampling of JEEViKA self-help groups which participate in the Food Security Fund (e.g., on a spectrum of remoteness, from geographically isolated villages through to those neighbouring urban areas and with good access to all-weather roads).

The GeoFabrik repository

Before signing off, I would also like to quickly flag the GeoFabrik repository, which I stumbled upon whilst trying to learn about OpenStreetMap (OSM) data this week. Whilst described as the “wikification of maps” by some, OSM is built upon crowdsourced contributions from the public, producing a completely free, editable canvas of the globe. GIS applications such as QGIS can load OSM base maps, but as far as I am aware, extracting useful geographical information from the base map (e.g., types of services, road types, water bodies etc.,) requires small tiles of the map to be imported from OSM servers. Attempts to import country-scale data not only takes a long-time, but it has so far slowed down the running of QGIS to an almost unusable speed!

GeoFabrik is an open data initiative which has made OSM data available as shapefiles (which QGIS is much happier handling). The website is organised by country, and then region (e.g., eastern zone of India), and data for Bihar can be found alongside the states of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. I am still yet to properly get to grips with the resource, but at a first glance, it seems to be an excellent option to help complement more formal data collections such as GeoSadak, particularly when it comes to the mapping of urban road networks, which is where OSM particularly excels (e.g., see the screengrab from QGIS above).

As I now sit on my train back from London, I had best leave things here. Apologies for the lengthy and rambling post; I probably need to get slightly better at planning my posts, as opposed to just sitting down, writing and seeing where things go! As always, if you have read until here, thank you for sticking with it! Until next time, G.

Links to datasets mentioned above:

* Post written up last Thursday (20/04/23)

Published by GregoryCooper

Former University of Southampton postgraduate student and postdoc at SOAS who is now in the Department of Geography and Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield. I hope to blog about my postdoc experiences, including fieldwork, travel and challenges... Thanks for stopping by!

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