Did you know that over lightning kills over 2,000 people In India every year? And that all of them are in Tamil Nadu and Goa! Or that India has 6% of the world’s working children. Or that Telangana has the highest rate of Caesareans in India?
DataBaaz, India’s first data & evidence visual platform launches today with a focus on simplifying complex datasets and converting numbers and statistics into crisp video stories. DataBaaz will target over 25 million young Indians in the coming year by putting out one fresh video clip every day in English and Hindi. In short, it will use data to tell visual stories.
DataBaaz will primarily track issues that matter to all of us; health, education, environment and climate change, gender, youth and governance for the time-strapped YouTube generation looking for authentic and verified news.
This is the first time data is being presented in an easy to understand, short-video format, at scale. DataBaaz extracts its information from open-source datasets published by government and international organizations and its own research. The data in DataBaaz is powered extensively by IndiaSpend, the country’s first and only public interest data journalism initiative.
‘We are doing three things. Letting the numbers tell the story, focusing on stories that are under-represented in mainstream media and delivering the stories for pure mobile consumption. We will be the only digital channel addressing all three aspects’, said Miloni Bhatt, of DataBaaz, a television journalist who reported at NDTV 24X7 for over 10 years.
In its launch phase, DataBaaz will cover India’s 2019 elections from a data-driven and fact-based perspective providing information on candidates, political party manifestos, the performance of sitting parliamentarians, voting trends and socio-economic indicators to create awareness and inform young voters on issues that impact their everyday lives.
Initially, DataBaaz stories will be available in English, Hindi and will leverage its partnerships and affiliations with mainstream media, academia, multilateral and civil society organisations.
DataBaaz is an initiative of Mumbai-based Live Data Visualisation, analytics + visualisation company founded and run by journalists.