P.C. Mohanan: Tapping data to define the India story

livemint.com:

This is part of a special series of articles by the country's foremost voices, ahead of Union Budget 2024, aiming to draw attention to the critical reforms that can help India in its journey to become a developed nation by 2047. The vision to be ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047 can become reality only when we closely monitor progress towards our development targets and can prove at the end that we successfully met them. This rests on the institutional capacity to measure defined indicators and present them in an unbiased manner.

Official statistics, considered an integral part of a country’s development infrastructure, perform this role. The United Nations has recognized that “official statistics provide an indispensable element in the information system of a democratic society, serving the government, the economy and the public with data about the economic, demographic, social and environmental situation." However, this element functions within the domain of the government, making its framework and architecture heavily reliant on the priorities and perceptions of the government of the day.

Can India’s statistical system surmount these challenges? The foundation for official data collection was laid immediately after Independence when the country opted for a planned economic path. Before that, the decennial censuses, commercial trade statistics and other administrative reports were the primary source of data.

The wholehearted support of the government and the data that the planning process needed ensured that India adopted several innovative statistical processes. In fact, few may remember that one of the first mainframe computers imported in the country in the mid-1960s was installed in the ministry of statistics! The technical