Synergy vs control

Restoring data credibility should be priority

The government has reportedly decided to go ahead with the merger, first proposed in the National Policy on Official Statistics last year, of the National Sample Survey Office, or NSSO, with the Central Statistics Office, or CSO. Both come under the Union Ministry for Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). A new National Statistical Organisation will be formed, and the office of the Chief Statistician of India, as secretary to the National Statistical Commission, will be done away with. The new National Statistical Organisation (NSO) will be headed by the secretary to the statistics ministry.

This reorganisation of the statistical agencies takes on special significance at this moment. In the past, it might have evaded close attention and been seen merely as a bureaucratic reshuffle or a minor administrative change. But recent events have caused far greater attention to be paid to the process by which official statistics are collated and approved. On the one hand, it might lead to greater synergies within the statistics machinery of the Union government. Official statistics might now come out at greater speed, and efficiencies might be observed throughout the system. Government officials have argued that the current system has built-in redundancies and duplications and that these might be addressed through streamlining the bureaucracies, merging them, and bringing them into one organisation under a single leader. Certainly, as a general principle, this is the manner of change that is required to take place throughout the bureaucracy of the Union government and thus cannot be faulted on those grounds. Administrative reform should always be in the direction of greater efficiency.
 

However, the statistics machinery of the Government of India is a special case, and even more so at the current moment. Widespread questions have been asked about the independence of the data preparation process. These questions began with, but are no longer limited to, the headline number for gross domestic product and economic growth. In order to answer questions about the new series of GDP, a back series was announced last year but this only intensified doubts about the quality of the data. It downgraded the growth record of the United Progressive Alliance government and upgraded that of the National Democratic Alliance government. These murmurs became overpowering when senior statisticians first resigned following the government’s failure to release jobs data from the NSSO. This data showed that unemployment was at its highest point for 45 years, causing some to wonder about the possibility of political interference in official statistics — something that India has never hitherto had a problem with. A few weeks ago, another report by the NSSO showed that a large number of companies in the MCA21 database either could not be traced or had closed down or were operating in different sectors. It is clear therefore that, rather than streamlining the statistics machinery, restoring its credibility, transparency and independence should be the priority. Unfortunately, a new and unified organisation under the ministry’s secretary does not serve that purpose. Observers will not see this as leading to an increase in the data’s credibility. Questions about its reliability now will continue to increase.