Newsmaker: Pravin Srivastava, India's zealously diligent Chief Statistician

The new chief statistician's reputation for diligence could have a salutary effect on the government at a time when the quality of its data is under intense scrutiny

Long years ago before Pronab Sen became India’s first chief statistician, turning the post of secretary, ministry of statistics and programme implementation, into a highly respected academic position, officers from the Indian Administrative Service cadre used to dread the call-up.
 
A finance secretary, who had once served a term in Sardar Patel Bhawan as secretary in the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, was at pains to keep that information obscure. He wasn’t the only one. It was literally the kiss of death, because a secretary of the ministry had just no chance to do what secretaries do best — write policies and extract respectable-sized budgets to finance those policies. Instead, the incumbent in this post is supposed to measure — price levels, industrial and agricultural production, households and put it all together as the GDP of the country. The substantive work is done by the National Sample Survey Office and the Central Statistics Office — the secretary mostly acted as an administrative head.
 
Sen changed the discourse. It changed even more in 2015 when the launch of the new series of GDP became a political football. The secretary and chief statistician of India had to play a pivotal role to convince economists and sundry others about the authenticity of the data used to firm up the new GDP numbers.
 
Which is why the appointment of Pravin Srivastava as the third chief statistician of India has attracted attention.
 
He replaces the second chief statistician, TCA Anant, who retired in January this year. The government had appointed a search committee under the cabinet secretary, P K Sinha, to find Anant’s successor; while no time line was set to complete the exercise, it has taken eight months to reach here.
 
As chief statistician, Srivastava will have barely two years, unless the government gives him an extension. There is a provision for it, though whether it can run past the retirement age of government servants (60 years) is not clear. Srivastava ,of course, has the right credentials for the post. A masters in mathematical statistics from Lucknow University, he joined the Indian Statistical Service (ISS) in the government of India. He was part of the team that conceived the annual health surveys, which was subsequently taken over by the Census of India office. As a Business Standard report notes, he has also helped develop the health management information system of the ministry of health, which is providing the back-up data for Ayushman Bharat.
 
Srivastava will be the second graduate from Lucknow University to join this government’s key economic team. The first was Rajiv Kumar, vice-chairman of Niti Aayog. Like Kumar, his academic qualifications in statistics are earned from Indian universities, except for a post-graduate degree in development studies from the UK.
 
Although the search committee has not made public how many applications it considered for the post, it is understood that ISS had made a strong representation to the committee to ensure that the post was retained within its cadre.
 
Sen’s appointment was something of a self-selection on account of his formidable reputation as the author of the Tenth Five Year Plan, written when he was principal adviser in the erstwhile Planning Commission, but Anant’s appointment ran smack into controversy. The genial professor from Delhi School of Economics saw his appointment cancelled by the Central Administrative Tribunal on a petition filed by a senior ISS officer to restrict the choice to their cadre. The government overruled the tribunal order. Anant enjoyed a seven-and-a-half-year term as secretary since he joined when he was less than 53 years in 2011. He was the youngest secretary to the government of India at the time.

 
The ISS has been third time lucky with Srivastava. Besides being the secretary in the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, he will also be in charge of data divisions of Central Statistics Office, of the National Sample Survey Organisation as well as the Programme Implementation wing and the MP Local Area Development Scheme.
 
He has effectively earned a double promotion, vaulting up from the post of additional director general to that of secretary, going over the posts of director generals in the ministry. It shows a lot of faith in his candidature. The new chief statistician, as all his colleagues recount, is diligent. At a time when the quality of the government data is under intense scrutiny, this diligence could have a salutary effect.
“Long after all lights were switched off in the UPSC at night, he would still be there, clearing files,” said a colleague of his who worked with him there for years.
 
One of the first challenges for him will be to take a decision on officially rolling out the back series of GDP to establish that the new series is congruent with the old series, putting an end to the political controversy on whether the Indian economy has done better under this regime or the previous one. As he told Business Standard, there is a long list of data that would be released under his watch besides the usual periodic ones. There are surveys, two covering the services sector and unincorporated enterprises, and a time-use survey. None of them might draw as much attention as the employment series he is expected to release, soon.