- Cases
- India
Real-time Monitoring Dashboard for Large-Scale RCT in India
01 Situation
A randomized evaluation spanning 215 police stations across three Indian states, J-PAL South Asia and its partners sought to assess the impact of Women’s Help Desks (WHDs) on women’s access to police services. The study involved more than 18,000 structured interviews conducted with complainants, frontline officers, and station heads, alongside audits and administrative data extraction.
02 Assignment
To design and deploy a live monitoring solution that would track survey implementation in real-time, identify quality issues early, and support corrective actions. The dashboard needed to be scalable, low-cost, and accessible to a distributed team of field managers across regions.
03 Approach
The team developed a high-frequency monitoring dashboard using Google Data Studio, dynamically linked to SurveyCTO data streams. The system tracked interviews by treatment arm, district, call outcome, and enumerator, enabling disaggregated analysis of coverage, refusals, and interview duration. Embedded validation checks allowed field managers to rapidly identify anomalies such as interview gaps, inconsistent response patterns, or non-compliance with randomization protocols. The dashboard supported continuous feedback loops through weekly data quality reviews and embedded logic for auto-flagging incomplete submissions.
Credentials: Consultant on this project was Mrignaina TIkku
Outreach session at a Women’s Help Desk site
04 Result
The dashboard was adopted across all rounds of data collection and became a core supervision tool for regional managers. Over a 6-month period, it facilitated the real-time monitoring of over 18,000 interviews across three states. It also supported automated balance checks and protocol adherence, significantly improving data completeness and quality with no additional overhead.
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