Burning issues remain that way because people don't delve into data

Recently, I presented a business plan to set up a chain of rural warehouses for storing post harvest produce. Amongst the 4 member jury, 2 of them had no prior experience in the agriculture sector(investing/operations) etc, and this showed in the slightly naive questions they asked. While my team's rigorous ground work helped, it opened my eyes to the fact that people often do not seek out publicly available data on the internet, and prefer to rely on the sensational and biased media reporting. This is why several burning issues/misconceptions prevail on the net. Some of them are below

• Human rights violations by police/armed forces:-Activists are prompt to critique the 'rampant' human rights violations under AFSPA and other laws, but forget that the members of police/army are often drawn from the same poor classes whom they oppress. Also, the numbers are not analyzed(how many incidents vs overall scale of violence) etc
• Agricultural input subsidy:-Lobbies commission exquisite reports about how agriculture needs subsidized electricity, seeds, fertilizer, higher MSP, cheap loans etc. What is not highlighted is who gets the lion's share of these(not small farmers), and whether these are effective or not(Prof Anil Gupta cites evidence that non sustainable farming is costly AND a failure).
• Actual volumes/outcomes:-India has good patent laws, but very few design registrations(even though at Rs 100/design it is the cheapest IP). Similarly, the number of beneficiaries of certain schemes are quite low. It is easy to understand spending trends, but not that easy to search for outcomes. But how many of us bother to do that?
•  Election result analysis:-With a wealth of data about voter turnouts, victory margins, constituency trends, election expenditure etc, there is scope for an entire website devoted to analyzing in an user friendly way(dashboards, drill down, export to Excel) election data. But this is not done, and often the only time it happens is the day post elections. Thankfully, papers like TOI are giving this wide coverage and hopefully election analysis will soon go way past the number of seats won/vote share.
• Ticking timebombs like budget deficits:-As an equity research analyst would know under the mosaic theory, weaving together numbers from different perspectives gives a good view to avoid '7 wise men of Hindustan' type of tunnel vision. Unfortunately, only consultants/investment bankers do such narratives, and in the public discourse space, this is not done. 
• Reservations:-Few issues match this in the public divide, vitiated debate and lack of data/research. there is no way to settle this issue one way or the other. But unfortunately, worthwhile data/stats are tucked away in obscure sociological research. and are not part of the public debate sphere. 

The Way forward:-Google Scholar gives access to otherwise unreachable data, and the same is true for Wikileaks/Google Public Data explorer. It is now the public duty to delve into data, atleast for data one is interested in, and then share the results with the public via open source platforms like updating Wikipedia entries, editing Wikibooks or publishing on blogs.