Politicians, IAS officers, engineers - all start analyzing important situations with key numbers. Many to most of the times, no call to action is made. This has been going on for a very long time, in so many government departments. Here are a few examples:

1. Tamil Nadu has not recruited enough number of teachers, for more than 10 years. The demand and recruitment are not even close.
2. More than 50% of the engineering college seats go unfilled, in the last 5 years, across India.
3. Severe water shortage across many places in Tamil Nadu.

With so many analytics, number crunching etc., where do we lose the battle? There is one first step before you jump into a formal analytics activity. That is, applying common sense. The senior management or the apex body must first apply this common sense to any situation or problem.

If the state has the "feel" that investment in education is the best long term asset, they would have recruited teachers long ago!

If the colleges "feel" that quality of education is more important than an air-conditioned hostel or international food, they would have attracted large number of students!

In Nov-Dec-2018, more than 200,000 cubic feet of water per second, was released to bay of Bengal, from the river Cauvery. How can the local bodies forget the basic of water storage practices? Had that been done, today you will not be seeing water tankers in every street of Chennai and a huge fighting crowd around that!

But, every newspaper and TV show amazing bar charts, pie charts, line charts (and what not) on water levels, college seat levels etc. What is the use of analytics and visualization if we collectively forget common sense?