Where's the data?
Re: "Partnering up for a resilient future", (Opinion, Nov 20). My social media feeds have been overflowing with desperate reels from the recent mega-flooding. And amid all this chaos, one question hangs heavily in the air: Where is the government? And more importantly, even if it wanted to respond, how would it know where help is needed?
We talk endlessly about "resilient cities" and "sustainable development" but none of that matters when the state cannot perform the most basic function of modern governance: making decisions based on reliable, accessible, and integrated public data. This disaster not only exposes the failure to prepare, but also reveals something even more fundamental -- we do not actually know our country. This crisis is not a surprise. It is just the latest event forcing us to confront a painful truth: Thailand suffers from fragmented, bureaucratic, ineffective governance rooted in a deep neglect of data.
Floodwaters don't just submerge streets; they reopen the long-festering wound of development studies' most basic principle -- know your people. Infrastructure maps sit in separate departments; water, climate, and environmental records which are never linked. We do not have a unified dataset of vulnerable populations. When disaster strikes, we cannot answer the simplest questions: Who is most at risk? Where do they live? What do they need?
In many developed countries, public data is a fundamental civic infrastructure. In the United States, for example, census data is freely available down to minuscule block groups. As an urban planning student, I have worked with these datasets to study housing affordability, inequities, climate risk, and neighbourhood change. Yet in Thailand, I cannot even map median household income across provinces.
This lack of public data also chokes Thai innovation. Research, technological development, and economic planning all rely on data. And when it comes to climate adaptation and disaster resilience, planning is impossible without understanding people, places, and risks at a granular level.
Yes, building a national shared data centre requires money, political will, technical expertise, and sustained investment. But the cost of doing nothing is far higher.
