Govt Shouldn't Junk Unpleasant Data

Suppressing data that point to low growth, rising joblessness and poverty impedes effective policymaking in a crisis

- Biswajit Mandal, Saswati Chaudhuri

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech, said “data is the new oil” and stressed on the credibility of data to combat the difficulties in realtime monitoring of the Indian economy. She even proposed building data centre parks throughout the country so that skilful incorporation of data in every step of the value-chain can take place.

However, in spite of such demagogy concerning the role of data, the Finance Minister was not able to shrug off the controversy surrounding ‘data’. Discrepancies were reported in the budgetary allocation for certain schemes, which were then covertly corrected. Refusing to learn from past experiences, the Finance Minister yet again relied on over estimated growth assumption of gross tax revenue.

The projection is 12 per cent, which is way higher than the estimated nominal GDP growth of 10 per cent. Last year, the gross tax revenue grew at a meagre 4 per cent while nominal GDP grew at 7.5 per cent.

In the Budget speech, the Finance Minister emphasised on 10 per cent nominal growth rate of GDP without mentioning what the real GDP could be. This must have been done to keep the masses in the dark about the recent declining trend in GDP figures. The coronavirus debacle deepens the mystery!

The muzzling of data has not been a new strategy for governments at the Centre, but the perturbing thing is that it still continues.

How it started

The government has in recent years been facing public ire for not releasing comprehensive jobs data regularly. The story started when the NSSO’s 2017-18 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) stated that the unemployment rate hovering around 6.1 per cent was a 45year high since 1972-73.