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Business News/ Opinion / Views/  Opinion | A celebratory occasion nobody knows about
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Opinion | A celebratory occasion nobody knows about

Tomorrow is National Statistics Day, meant to remind ourselves of how vital they are to India’s development. May it never turn into yet another occasion for platitudes

 (Jayachandran/Mint)Premium
(Jayachandran/Mint)

Last week, the world celebrated Yoga Day. Barely a week before that, there was Father’s Day, marked suspiciously like an afterthought soon after Mother’s Day. Earlier in the year, there was Valentine’s Day. The list has grown too long for most of us to stay in the loop of all these annual commemorations, let alone observe them in a way that would please their champions. On Saturday, however, is an occasion that deserves to be rescued from obscurity—or from the clutches of numeracy nerds. It is our National Statistics Day, observed since 2007 on 29 June, the birth anniversary of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the architect of Independent India’s statistical data frame, as it were. The occasion is best marked by generating awareness of the invaluable contribution made by reliable statistics to the country’s development.

Statistics are measures of things that vary. To a casual observer, such numbers can be dull. Numerals tend to look alike. Yet, data interpreted properly yields information, which, if accurate, forms the bedrock of knowledge. Capturing the broad reality of a country through such data points is a specialized task. Any bias could distort the picture, rendering it a failure. Ensuring that the tools used to gather and crunch data are unbiased has always been a challenge in a country of India’s complexity. This being so, it is to the credit of the country’s statistical institutions that its official estimates of various variables over the decades have not only guided the country’s governance well, they have also gained global credibility and served as inputs for much academic research. The man behind India’s early statistical success was Mahalanobis, of course, who was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at King’s College, Cambridge, before he took up Jawaharlal Nehru’s mission of setting up our national surveys, statistical agencies and academic institutes. The inputs of his statistical exercises were famously used in India’s five-year plans, which have been abandoned in the era of a market economy but helped crystallize the idea of planning ahead.

Whatever the model of development, the statistics being used as policy inputs need to be reliable. In recent years, however, doubts have arisen over the integrity of a few numbers put out by government organs, figures that are widely used as yardsticks to measure the economy’s performance: the gross domestic product, for example. For a country with a long tradition of statistical integrity, regardless of what the numbers reveal of the country, that is saddening indeed. As a new government prepares to present its first budget in Parliament amid expectations of reforms to boost economic growth, perhaps our policymakers need to widen the ambit of what they consider reforms. A comprehensive review of our statistical systems may be worthwhile. It’s true that formulae for calculations need to evolve in accordance with shifting realities, and several changes have been introduced since 2015 in the way the economy’s pace is measured. How accurately India’s national income is being captured, however, is still not clear. The government has sought to address concerns over its data credibility by issuing clarifications that have not been convincing enough. This necessitates that we do more to clear the air on our statistics. Unless we do that, the country’s policies could be at some risk of being poorly informed. Let’s not turn National Statistics Day into yet another occasion for platitudes. Instead, let’s fix what needs to be fixed.

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Published: 28 Jun 2019, 12:04 AM IST
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