The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has formed a new Standing Committee on Statistics (SCoS) to advise on official data, including the household surveys carried out by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Headed by India’s first Chief Statistician, Pronab Sen, the SCoS replaces a similar panel set up in December 2019 to advise on economic statistics. While Mr. Sen also headed the incumbent panel, the SCoS formed now has a broader mandate to help design surveys for all types of data, identify data gaps that must be plugged, and conduct pilot surveys for new data sets. With 14 members, the new panel is also leaner and more likely to deliver quality guidance. The 28-member economic data review panel may have found it tougher to establish a coherent consensus. One of the new panel’s first tasks will likely pertain to the results of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) by the NSSO over the past year, and it must sensitise users on the methods deployed and interpretational nuances they necessitate.
The HCES is critical not only to ascertain people’s living standards over time but also the key to revising economic indicators such as the Consumer Price Index and the Gross Domestic Product used to measure the economy’s output. The last survey, with another quinquennial employment survey, was conducted in 2017-18, but the government had opted to junk the findings in November 2019, citing data quality issues. Then, top government mandarins sought to discredit the official statistical machinery’s methods to dispute reports that the NSSO’s consumption and employment surveys reflected elevated economic distress in households. Now, members of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister have revived such critiques, perhaps as a pre-emptive move to deflect from any adverse outcomes that the latest HCES may throw up. That is, if its results are published. Data from the 2017-18 Survey released by Maharashtra indicates that households’ spending power and access to amenities had improved since 2011-12, despite the demonetisation shock, although inequality widened on some fronts. So, that data was not all bad news after all. Whether data is fit for release should be left to the independent National Statistical Commission that was reconstituted late last year but is still marred by vacancies. Simply destroying the credibility of one’s own systems may achieve short-term obfuscation goals, but it also leaves one clutching at straws to prove governance outcomes. The SCoS can pro-actively try to bridge the trust deficit between India’s once-revered statistical system and data users, which has led to the current vacuum of official data. The end result of such a vacuum is that government policy neither acknowledges nor addresses some ground realities that warrant intervention.
