Telangana Rising 2047 – Information Bureau to generate alternative credit scores mooted

Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy-led Congress government in its TG Rising 2047 Vision is proposing an Information Bureau that will harness alternative datasets such as property registration and electricity payments to generate individual credit record scores.

It will be a consent-based digital information bureau that drawing on the alternative data will generate verifiable individual credit histories to expand access to formal low-cost credit for credit-invisible households.

Projected as a measure to bridge the gap that exists in formal credit access, the Telangana Information Bureau (TIB) will be a “secure, privacy-preserving and research-driven data infrastructure.” It will integrate verified administrative datasets such as property registration, electricity payments, welfare transfers and tax records to generate alternative credit scores for individuals as well as enterprises.

The idea is to develop a composite alternative credit score through expert-led analytics that transforms raw data into anonymised financial signals and use the same to expand formal credit access for individuals without a CIBIL score, particularly Self-Help Group members and low-income households.

However, towards ensuring financial inclusion advances alongside data protection, only the derived score and not the underlying data will be shared with lenders, the draft document showed.

Non-credit data such as utility bill payments, e-commerce transactions, and government tax payment records will be integrated by TIB to assess individual repayment discipline. The analysis will enable lenders to serve new-to-credit borrowers confidently using richer, real-time financial behaviour insights.

From a data privacy and protection perspective, the State plans to maintain a strong regulatory oversight in collaboration with RBI for transparency and consumer protection. Robust legal standards will be established to ensure personal data is shared only with informed consent, with strict controls against misuse or predatory lending.

TIB will operate as a non-profit, public-utility-style entity and evolve over time into a national model for data-driven financial inclusion, supporting credit expansion, welfare targeting and risk-based subsidy programmes. It will position Telangana as a pioneer of inclusive, evidence-based, and privacy-compliant financial systems.

It will operate as a financial inclusion use case within the Telangana Data Exchange (TGDeX), launched recently by the State IT Department, leveraging the latter’s data banks, AI model repository, and sandbox IDE to securely access, process, and analyse anonymised datasets.

According to the government, the journey toward comprehensive financial inclusion has entered a decisive and opportunity-rich phase for deepening household -level financial empowerment. The next frontier is not merely expanding access, but in enhancing quality, affordability and individualisation of credit, enabling low-income households, especially women to transition from group-based to individual, data-driven, and low-cost credit pathways through formal institutions.