Needed: A credible plan to fix India’s statistical system
rb.gy/6k3bi). This column is about its key takeaways, focusing on what the Indian state should do to fix the gaping holes in our statistical system. A majority of stakeholders feel that India’s statistical system is facing a crisis, and one that has been long in the making.
In the early post-independence period, academic researchers and official statisticians worked together to produce a number of statistical innovations that helped policymakers make sense of a complex economy. Since the mid-1970s, both statistical innovation and investments slowed down even as the worlds of research and official statistics moved apart. Growing insularity, the lack of investments in computing resources and the declining influence of the Planning Commission (which had earlier been a pillar of support for statisticians) eroded the statistical system’s effectiveness.
By the turn of the 20th century, India’s statistical crisis had become too severe to be ignored. In early 2000, the government appointed a commission led by C. Rangarajan to review and suggest ways to improve the statistical system.
Some of the commission’s recommendations were implemented, but only in a half-hearted manner. The modest reforms initiated in the wake of the Rangarajan commission’s recommendations failed to resolve the deep-rooted crisis the system faced. The development of the country’s statistical system remained stunted, impacting the credibility of data releases.
While the digitization of public data-sets over the past two decades has led to explosive growth in the quantity of data, there has been very little investment in improving data quality. As a result, the quality of administrative data varies vastly across states and departments. Even the quality of
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