Data please: Government figures shrouded in secrecy entail economic risks

livemint.com:

An important person in the government requested me to write about how the subsidy from Union budgets for second-class AC train seats in India has grown since 2014, given that these fares haven’t been adjusted for rising fuel costs. I haven’t managed to figure out if there is a subsidy on these fares, let alone how fast it may be growing. Happy to be corrected, but it seems that the outgo towards this subsidy and the figures needed for computing it are not being reported in the Union Budget.

When India’s railway and Union budgets were merged, officials had informally told reporters that presentations of separate railway budgets bred populism. Railway ministers made a big deal of announcing new stations and trains, skewing attention and resources to their home states and constituencies. The spotlight this pageantry put on passenger-train services made raising fares politically difficult, they said.

Scrapping the separate rail budget was supposed to free fares of political compulsions. The worry now is if this ‘reform’ may instead have increased opacity and reduced scrutiny of budgetary details. From this month, the Central government has stopped publishing the details of revenue collections from the goods and services tax (GST).

Beat reporters covering the finance ministry were informally informed that tax collections rising month after month made this data politically inconvenient. The clampdown is entirely unnecessary. The government finds itself in a spot only because all along it highlighted the absolute collection numbers, one month after another.