'You never discard GDP because GDP has a huge advantage'

Q&A with TCA Anant, secretary and chief statistician, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implemenation

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will organise its fourth round of a four-day World Forum in India from October 16. It is for the first time that the forum will be held in a developing country. The theme of the forum is 'Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making’ and the idea is to look beyond GDP to devise parameters for the post-2015 development agenda of the United Nations. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implemenation (MoSPI) is hosting the Forum on behalf of OECD. MoSPI secretary and chief statistician TCA Anant tells Dilasha Seth and Indivjal Dhasmana about various facets of the Forum. Edited interview:

Why is MoSPI hosting a conference on behalf of OECD when India is not part of the organisation?
Statistics is not all about techniques. Official statistics is about picking from the vast lists of techniques and agreeing on a set of principles. GDP is not valuable because of what it does. There are lots of problems with GDP, but its attractiveness is that the global community has agreed that this is the way we will measure. That agreement has  value. It is a consensus which matters. This consensus is built in the United Nations through UN Statistical Commission. Now, we engage with OECD because it is one of the most influential voices. OECD is used by UN Statistical Commission as an agent for lots of discussion. If, we don't participate in these discussions, by the time they formulate a view and submit it to the UN, a lot of water would have flowed. If we want our concerns to be reflected in measurements, we need to  be there in the process of dialogue. India also represents voices of developing world. If only advanced nations are left to decide on measurements, we will have parameters difficult to be implemented or ones which do not capture our reality.

What is the need to look beyond GDP?
There is a long running OECD project on measuring well being. The theme itself arose in OECD, partly with the concern that GDP does not adequately capture the development dimension of societies. You see, there have been a number of parameters that have been suggested. The human development index (HDI), for instance tries to bring in issues like literacy, infant mortality, life expectancy etc. Other indices try to look at inequality in various ways like gender disparities etc. These are different facets of development which are not adequately captured in GDP.

Will the Forum look at the happiness index?
The happiness index is something which the Government of Bhutan developed and has been pushing for long. Don't go by the word alone. It is an index which includes various parameters of social existence other than GDP. There are similar exercises done in other countries which will also be presented.

With your long career as a statistician in various offices, what is your take on measuring development through "beyond GDP" parameters?
Different countries have different elements which they may wish to include based on their structure. For example, in India one of our concerns has been that we are a very heterogeneous society in terms of language, caste, religion. We have looked at measures which seek to measure disparity, this is a concern which is much deeper in India than would be in other countries, which have much more homogenous population structure. We have tried to look at development by social groups. There is a well documented study by justice Sachar on the status of muslims in the country, saying that development parameters in specific social groups have very different outcomes than average. This means that for us development means much more than simply a movement in the average, even if we look beyond GDP parameters.

What is the idea? To discard GDP or accompany it with other parameters?
You never discard GDP because GDP has a huge advantage. There is a consensus around it. It reflects at one level something tangible. It measures the value of economic activity. In that sense, the GDP measures have huge robustness. They have correlated with political clout of countries. The GDP numbers have related well with delivering certain outcomes. GDP has a long history. I don't think anyone is seeking to displace GDP. What they are looking for is to be able to highlight that GDP does not capture everything.

How does the whole thing relate to India?
Early models of growth and development in India were somewhat simplistic. Those models looked at this correlation between GDP and other indicators and said if correlation is strong, that means a rise in GDP will improve other parameters as well. Early, modeling exercises for development including plans, focused exclusively on providing economic growth as measured by GDP. In the 1970s itself in India, there was a recognition that economic growth was not happening fast enough, but social aspirations have to be met. Besides, there was a series of studies done and this is where India's contribution to this area becomes very important. For example, professor K N Raj moved to set up the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram  to study Kerala state in a number of ways. The emphasis was that you could achieve improvement in health, literacy etc before the growth in GDP takes place. So, the causality started to be questioned.