As the tenure of India’s first chief statistician draws to a close, Pronab Sen feels that the greatest challenge for him as he took over the post was to stop the process of deterioration which had engulfed the Indian Statistical System. With the establishment of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) in 2005 and a focused approach at improving the timeliness and accuracy of Indian statistics, Sen feels that the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) phave been significantly successful in decelerating the deterioration even as there is a lot to achieve going ahead.
He states that the consistently high human resource constraint is proving to be the biggest hurdle in increasing the efficiency of Indian statistics. There is a unanimous recognition within MoSPI and the statistical fraternity that resource constraint is a glaring problem which is hampering the growth and development of the official statistical system. However, just creating more posts at the Centre and the state level does not solve the problem as the ministry is finding it difficult to fill existing vacancies.
“There are not enough people in the statistical system and I do not know what we can do about the resource constraint scenario. At the moment, I have 1,200 vacancies. If I can’t fill the existing posts, what is the use of asking for more?” said Pronab Sen, outgoing chief statistician of India and secretary of MoSPI.
The structure of the Indian economy has most of the action happening in the unorganised sector. This requires data collection to be survey-based is both time-consuming and extremely resource-intensive. “This is a problem which cannot be brushed aside, graduates and post-graduates are looking at better avenues which provide better turnovers,” said Suresh Tendulkar, past chairman of NSC.
However, as analysts continue to take Indian statistics with a pinch of salt and timeliness remains an issue, most say that Indian statistics has shown considerable improvement over the last 5-6 years. The major reason, according to experts, is the focused attention and importance given to statistics by policy makers, media and analysts.
“Our policy makers including the Prime Minister are extremely involved in official statistical activity which is a break from the earlier trend of governance keeping the statistical machinery at an arm’s distance. We are talking about the problems and are also thinking about the solutions,” said Anil P Gore, member of NSC. Moreover, Gore adds that the statistical infrastructure in the country has significantly developed over the years on the lines of developed nations. However, he does confess that the increasingly aging composition of official statistical systems is going to be a problem going ahead.
Analysts of economic think-tanks state that the reliability of Indian statistics has improved and is at satisfactory levels.
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“Indian statistics are actually superior to many (in the world). Observing the data in the last couple of years, the reliability has been good. There is scope for improvement of course, but I think with the base revisions, the coverage and accuracy will be enhanced,” said D K Joshi, principal economist with ratings agency Crisil.
Others state that even as Indian statistics point accurately to the trends in the economy they are not reliable to gauge the actual levels in which such trends are working in the economy.
“As far as trends are concerned, they represent it quite well, however the actual levels are not really revealed. There are problems in reporting and time lags. For policy making, one cannot just rely exclusively on Indian statistics,” said Sumita Kale, chief economist of research firm Indicus Analytics.
The ministry has tried to make up for the resource constraint problem by tying up with other government departments to assist in data collection. Such attempts include tying up with the postal department for the new consumer price index to be out in 2011. Other such collaborations included using MCA 21 data for the new series of National Accounts with a revised base of 2004-05.
Moreover, the ministry is also in discussion with the Income Tax Department for national accounts which will substantially increase the coverage of the data. Adding to this, the statistical system is in the process of upgrading bases of four major economic indicators like IIP, WPI, CPI in the next financial year which will include making the coverage more extensive and relevant.
However, such measures have limited benefits and are not useful for other important statistics like labour, unemployment and other human development categories.
India now being a member of International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Data Dissemination System (SDDS) needs to increase its statistical coverage and include human development categories and increase the frequency and efficiency of the surveys. However, the ministry has not yet come out with the core statistics, which is basically targeted at identifying a list of essential data which is useful for policy making. Identifying core statistics is essential for India as it will be a step to meet statistical commitments made by India to international agencies like the United Nations. Thus, as far as evolving for a rapidly changing social economy like India, the statistical machinery still has a long way to go.
“One needs to be a little careful about these tie-ups, it depends very largely on the complexity of the data you need to collect and the kind of skillset that the people who are collecting the data need to have. For prices, the nature of the data is simple and straight but for other data it might not be successful,” adds Sen.