New Delhi: At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is stressing on the importance of water conservation, NITI Aayog’s claim that 21 cities will run out of groundwater by 2020 has been stated to be inaccurate.
In a series of tweets, Joanna Slater, the Indian Bureau Chief of The Washington Post, said the possibility of some of the major Indian cities running out of groundwater by next year seems to be a “zombie statistic”.
A zombie statistic is “a false or misleading statistic that is repeated multiple times despite its inaccuracy”.
NITI Aayog, government’s policy think tank, in a 2018 report, had made the claim, and attributed it to World Resources Institute, World Bank and two Indian newspapers — The Hindu and Hindustan Times.
But, Slater notes in her tweets, neither the World Resources Institute nor the World Bank ever published a report with this claim. The two Indian newspapers also incorrectly attributed it to the World Bank.
Ever since the publication of NITI Aayog’s report, major news outlets had picked up the statistics and it came to be accepted as some kind of fact.
“I realised that statistics might be dubious when I couldn’t find the source cited in the footnote, namely a World Bank report containing the figure. That piqued my curiosity so I decided to dig a little more,” Slater told ThePrint.
1/ Any fans of zombie statistics out there? I have a tale for you… There’s a dramatic figure that has circulated for the past year saying that 21 major Indian cities are expected to run out of groundwater by 2020, affecting 100 million people
— Joanna Slater (@jslaternyc) June 28, 2019
Zombie statistics in govt savings
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that an inaccurate figure without any solid basis was accepted so widely.
In 2016, it was widely-quoted that Aadhaar resulted in $11 billion annual savings of the government by filtering fake beneficiaries from welfare schemes. The figure was sourced from a 2016 World Bank report.
But, when noted economists Reetika Khera and Jean Dreze decided to dig deeper, they discovered that the report, in a footnote, cites a brief by the think tank ‘Consultative Group to Assist the Poor’. But, that brief doesn’t actually say that Aadhaar led to $11 billion savings — it was in fact an estimate of “the government’s total annual expenditure on major cash transfers”.
“This was either the result of very sloppy work by the World Bank where they confused potential savings with total expenditure or it was deliberate mischief,” Reetika Khera told ThePrint.
Many government officials, including then finance minister Arun Jaitley had even cited the World Bank report in his blog, and it was also submitted as a supporting document by the government when the Supreme Court was passing a verdict on the constitutional validity of Aadhaar.
Khera blames the Indian media for “blindly parroting that figure without bothering to verify”. “It doesn’t take an economist to see that something is off in those figures — this is a classic case of headline-hunting and click-baiting that resulted in this incorrect statistic being accepted in the mainstream,” she added.
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Number of army personnel in Kashmir incorrect
Another zombie statistic that is cited often by some Kashmiri Human Rights organisations, is that the Indian Army has deployed 7,00,000 army personnel in Kashmir. But, defence expert Ajai Shukla refuted this claim in his column in Business Standard where he calculated the number of security personnel in Kashmir and concluded there can only be, “4,70,000 security personnel, including the state police force.”
“This figure of 7,00,000 has come into existence through certain Kashmiri and Pakistani sources who wanted to use these false statistics to show that Kashmir is under the heels of India”, Shukla told ThePrint.
The fact that this incorrect number is so widely accepted is only evidence of the sloppy work that media do, Shukla said, adding that “they arbitrarily quote one another.”
Number of Indians in NASA also misleading
In 2008, it was mentioned in the Rajya Sabha that 36 per cent of NASA scientists are Indians. People even shared posts on various professional networking sites like LinkedIn, saying, without quoting any source, that 58 per cent of NASA employees are Indians.
But, according to NASA’s website, only 8 per cent of its workforce is Asian-American, making it highly unlikely that Indians would account for 36 per cent or 58 per cent of NASA scientists.
Half-understood statistics
While there are cases in which incorrect figures with no factual basis are accepted as facts, there are also those in which a more complex reality exists. Figures are actually estimated, but are later found to be inaccurate when better measurement techniques become available.
Take for instance the case of HIV statistics in India. In 2006, it was claimed that India nearly had 5.7 million people infected with the HIV virus. Former United States President Bill Clinton had even expressed concern over the appalling figure and some estimates circulating around claimed that India might end up having 20-25 million HIV-infected people by 2010.
Later, however, with an improved methodology, the 2006 numbers were revised significantly downwards, and estimated at around 2.5 million. This revision was widely reported and overtime has proven to be true.
It is also possible that multiple interpretations may exist for a statistic, but one becomes particularly popular for whatever reasons without an accompanying understanding of the same.
The size of the Indian middle class is a case in point.
It is said that the size of the Indian middle class, defined in a particular way, shot up to 600 million from 300 million between 2004 and 2012. Even former US President George Bush, in a 2006 speech, hailed India’s 300 million middle class. However, defined differently, American firm Mckinsey pegged the number at 50 million in 2007. However, there were objections raised to this characterisation of the middle class too.
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At least on groundwater depletion, Niti Aayog gets my vote. If not 2020, it could be 2025 or even 2030. If urban agglomerations are tapping unsustainably into their aquifers, a huge crisis awaits us. Something like the scenes coming out of Chennai. The number of affected people is in the tens of millions, beyond the emergency measures taken for Maharashtra’s villages for example. The constructive takeaway would be that for towns above a certain size, their regular supply should be tied up to a conventional, failsafe source like a dam. In a time of climate change, even sturdy dams are falling short.