PM advisory council member Shamika Ravi calls for greater focus on data quality in national surveys

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Economic Advisory Council to the PM (EAC-PM) on Thursday said the estimates of poverty from the National Sample Survey household consumption expenditure, done by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, might be exaggerated, given that it over-represents the rural and the socially disadvantaged, the scheduled caste, suggesting a need to focus on data quality. Further, the NSS estimates from the employment and unemployment for people engaged in the agricultural sector and the workforce participation rate might be exaggerated as well as it over-represents the rural population and the proportion of the working-age population at the national and rural and urban areas respectively, it said.

“National Sample Survey done by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation over-represents the rural population, the scheduled caste (SC) population, and the working-age (age between 15 and 59 years) population compared to the Census done during the same period, raising doubts on the representativeness of the Surveys,” EAC-PM member Shamika Ravi said in a working paper, analysing the data quality of NSS. The paper has been co-authoured by Mudit Kapoor of the Indian Statistical and SV Subramanian of Harvard University.

“Quantitatively, our data quality analysis suggests a reduction in the statistical efficiency ranging from 97% to 99.9%, implying that the NSS is statistically non-representative at the national level, including at the rural and urban levels,” the authors said. Talking about the implications of the analysis for survey strategy in general, the paper said there are consequences for surveys that use the same sampling strategy, such as the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in 2019–2114 and the