Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation A new Standing Committee on Statistics (SCOS) was constituted Advising on official data including household survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Headed by India’s first Chief Statistician, Pronab Sen, the SCOS replaces a similar panel set up in December 2019 to advise on economic data. While Mr. Sen was also the head of the existing panel, the now-constituted SCOS has a broader mandate to help design surveys for all types of data, identify data gaps that should be plugged, and conduct pilot surveys for new data sets. With 14 members, the new panel is also smaller and more likely to deliver quality guidance. The 28-member Economic Data Review Panel may find it difficult to establish a coherent consensus. One of the first tasks of the new panel will likely be to deal with the results of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) conducted by the NSSO during the last year, and sensitize users to the methods deployed and the interpretive nuances they require.
The HCES is not only important for tracking people’s standard of living over time, but also a key to revising economic indicators such as the consumer price index and gross domestic product, which are used to measure an economy’s output. The previous survey, along with another quinquennial employment survey, was conducted in 2017-18, but the government opted to scrap the findings in November 2019, citing data quality issues. Then, top government officials sought to discredit the methods of the official statistical machinery to dispute reports that the NSSO’s consumption and employment surveys reflected heightened economic distress among households. Now, members of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council have revived such criticisms, perhaps as a pre-emptive move to deflect attention from any adverse outcome of the latest HCES. That is, if its results are published. Data from the 2017-18 survey released by Maharashtra shows that despite the shock of demonetisation, households’ spending power and access to amenities have improved since 2011-12, although inequality has widened on some fronts. So, that data wasn’t bad news after all. Whether the data is fit to be released should be left to the independent National Statistics Commission, which was reconstituted late last year but still has a problem of vacancies. Simply destroying the credibility of one’s own system can achieve short-term illusory goals, but it also provides a straw to prove governance’s outcome. The SCOS may actively seek to bridge the trust deficit between India’s once respected statistical system and data users, which has led to the current vacuum of official data. The end result of such a vacuum is that government policy neither acknowledges nor takes into account some of the ground realities that require intervention.