New Delhi: In 2000 — when India’s statistical bodies were going through a major crisis after the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s — the central government under then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee set up a high-level commission to recommend reforms.
Twenty-years later, more than half of the reforms recommended by the Rangarajan Commission — named after former Reserve Bank of India governor C. Rangarajan, who chaired the panel — remain unimplemented, according to a new paper by US-based think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The paper, titled ‘India’s Statistical System: Past, Present and Future’ and authored by senior journalist Pramit Bhattacharya, looks at the history of government statistical offices in India and their current state. Among the most glaring, according to the paper released Thursday to commemorate India’s National Statistics Day on 29 June, is the lack of a legal framework for the National Statistical Commission (NSC) — India’s apex recommending body for statistical reforms set up in 2005 on the Rangarajan Commission’s recommendation.
The paper also pulled no punches when it came to criticising the state of India’s statistics department — it found that India’s data outdated and severely lacking, especially given that the last official numbers for important statistical data for information such as population census and consumer expenditure dates back to 2011-12.
Observed on 29 June every year since 2007, the National Statistics Day commemorates P.C. Mahalanobis, India’s foremost statistician and founder of the premier Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, on his birth anniversary.
A pioneer statistician, Mahalanobis was a prominent member of the first Planning Commission of independent India and was instrumental in formulating India’s strategy for industrialisation in the Second Five-Year Plan. He is also credited with beginning the National Sample Survey — one of India’s oldest and most diverse household surveys —
in 1950.
In order to mark the occasion, the RBI Monday also made public a speech of RBI Deputy Governor Michael Debabrata Patra in which he spoke about how “by reducing uncertainty to a quantifiable value, statistics enable monetary policy to manage its trade-offs and chart its course through known and unknown unknowns”.
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‘The worst of times’
Bhattacharya’s paper makes clear the importance of statistics to policy making.
“The statistical system of a country acts as its mirror… It generates the statistics that allow observers to see how well a country is performing on key socioeconomic parameters such as per capita income, inflation, poverty, life expectancy, and average years of schooling,” the paper said, adding that it enables policy-makers and investors “to make informed decisions”.
In many ways, this is “the worst of times for India’s data users”, according to Bhattacharya, who draws his conclusions from interviews with key stakeholders in the Indian statistical system, including bureaucrats, government officials, and academics who rely on government data.
“The uninterrupted run of India’s population census since 1881 has been broken,” the paper said. “The last decennial census was in 2011. The 2021 census has been postponed indefinitely. Other key datasets are badly out of date.”
But, it isn’t just data on population and demography that’s far behind. According to the paper, India’s official consumer expenditure data dates back to 2011-2012 since the next survey, undertaken in 2017-2018, was junked by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), “ostensibly due to data quality concerns”.
“The lack of fresh consumption data has meant that India’s consumer price index (CPI) and official poverty estimates continue to be pegged to outdated data,” the paper said. “The results of the latest economic census and several new surveys have been kept under wraps. Some of India’s core statistics — such as the index of industrial production (IIP) and gross domestic product (GDP) — have been the subject of controversy for several years.”
As if these issues weren’t enough, the paper noted that India’s apex statistical body has not only failed as regulator, but has also not been empowered to succeed as one, since it lacks the legislative backing as recommended by the Rangarajan panel.
“India’s apex statistical regulator, the National Statistical Commission (NSC), has struggled to assert its voice on these issues,” the paper said. “The NSC was supposed to audit statistical products on a regular basis, providing a much-needed quality assurance mechanism for data users. But it has failed to perform that role.”
Failing authority, lack of legal backing
In his paper, Bhattacharya talks of the decline in the authority of India’s statistics agencies after Mahalanobis’s death in 1972, and enumerates the efforts taken since then to revive them.
Bhattacharya claimed that 88 percent of data consumers he interviewed are of the opinion that there is a major crisis in India’s data landscape.
A major problem, according to the paper, was the inability of the Central Statistical Organisation (now called the Central Statistical Office) — a body the statistician founded in 1951 — in the “post-Mahalanobis era”.
CSO is a governmental agency responsible for co-ordination of statistical activities and evolving and maintaining statistical standards in India. Both NSC and CSO come under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
“Mahalanobis’s scientific achievements, his global stature, and his unique position in the Nehru cabinet ensured that he could act as a one-man statistical commission,” the paper said. “In the post-Mahalanobis era, the CSO struggled to assert its authority over other departments and ministries.”
The situation led to “multiple high-level committees” being set up — such as the Narain-Bhatnagar Committee in 1979 and the Rangarajan Commission in 2001 — to overhaul the system.
According to the paper, both committees put down the decline to one crucial element — the “weakening of statistical coordination across ministries and states”.
Despite this, however, problems persisted, primarily because many of the recommendations of the two panels remained ignored.
In 2001, the Rangarajan Commission pointed out the need to insulate the statistical system from the politics of the day. It recommended the creation of an apex body — the National Commission on Statistics — “which would be backed by a law and be accountable to Parliament rather than the government of the day”, Bhattacharya said in his paper. “The National Commission on Statistics would collectively perform the role that Mahalanobis played in the early years of India’s independence.”
Years later, not only is recommended legal backing for the NSC still missing, but, according to the paper, the body “has failed in most of its objectives in terms of reforms in the present day”.
In his paper, Bhattacharya comes up with another solution — setting up a Statistical Reforms Commission that would be able to “change the statistical architecture of India” and “focus on the issue of center-state coordination on statistics”. The body, it said, would have legislative backing.
“The statistical system is at a critical juncture today as it struggles to meet the requirements of the new economy without compromising statistical integrity,” the paper said. “A new reforms commission can outline a road map for reforms and reassure all stakeholders about the government’s seriousness in fixing a major governance deficit. A lot has changed in the world of statistics since the Rangarajan Commission submitted its report in 2001. The time has come for a fresh review and a comprehensive plan for rebooting the statistical system.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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