Bad Score Keeping

ARE SURVEY RESULTS BEING WITHHELD OR DISCREDITED BECAUSE THEY DON’T MATCH THE GOVERNMENT LINE OR IS THERE AN INHERENT PROBLEM IN THE WAY INDIA CONDUCTS ITS STATISTICS?

- Joe C. Mathew

On November 15, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) announced that it will not publish the results of a national household consumer expenditure survey carried out by its wing, the National Statistics Office (NSO), during the period July 2017 to June 2018 on account of “data quality issues”.

The MoSPI decision will impact the government’s GDP base year revision plans as the scrapped data set is crucial in revising the base year for calculating India’s economic (GDP) growth. The absence of this data will also deny India an opportunity to understand the changes that have happened in areas of poverty, food consumption, nutrition, malnutrition and a host of other issues during the last six years, as that was when a similar exercise was carried out last to generate comparable data points.

This is also the second instance, in recent times, of the results of a survey-based data analysis, prepared by an official government agency, being junked by the government itself. Results of the periodic labour force survey (PLFS) of NSO, again for the 2017/18 period, had met a similar fate. While the PLFS survey did get released after a long delay, it was discredited by the government, which said its findings related to job losses were not correct.

These may seem like isolated events but a possible dent to the credibility of India’s official data can have wider implications for the way other countries and potential investment, technology and trade partners see India. BT reached out to Pravin Srivastava, Chief Statistician of India and Secretary, MoSPI, for an official response, but could not elicit any. At the time of going to print, a response from Bimal Kumar Roy, Chairman, National Statistical Commission, was awaited.