Bring credibility back to India's numbers
[September 9, 2004 - Times of India]
Everybody knows that the late NDA government wanted to rewrite India's history to suit its peculiar ideological obsessions. Now, there is some evidence to indicate that it might have been massaging statistics over the last few years to make contemporary reality look more presentable to its constituents. On Monday, J K Banthia, registrar-general and census boss announced that in the 10 years from 1991-2001, the Muslim population had jumped 36 per cent, a growth rate that is higher than that of the previous decade and, of course, higher than the rate at which India's Hindu population has grown. All handouts released to media made the same point. The sangh parivar, which feeds on the paranoia of a 13 per cent Muslim population overtaking India's 80 per cent Hindu majority someday, made a feast of this tidbit. Trouble is, the census boss wasn't being entirely correct: he glossed over the fact that the 1991 census didn't count people in Jammu & Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, which the present one does. Correcting for that distortion, the Muslim population growth rate through 1991-2001 falls to 29 per cent, a big decline over the 1981-91 growth figure. We do not know whether Banthia, appointed by the BJP-led regime, sparked off an entirely irrelevant debate deliberately, but his actions were certainly irresponsible.
Recently, it has become clear that in order to burnish its 'India Shining' campaign with statistical gloss, the previous regime massaged inflation numbers. Research by a reputed finance company shows that key parameters of the wholesale price index (WPI), which measures hikes in producers' prices, were left unchanged for long periods — for as much as 46 months in some cases. The net effect of holding these numbers constant was to make inflation look lower than it actually was. Given that, it's no coincidence that one of the main campaign planks of the BJP was the supposedly-low level of inflation. Short-term numerical fiddles cast long shadows: The credibility of India's data-reporting system has been built up painstakingly, often at the cost of major embarrassment to the political system. The actions of the previous regime could severely undermine confidence in the entire system and reduce policymaking, which relies heavily on accurate numbers, to a hit-and-miss exercise. In terms of data accuracy, India has always been compared favourably to China. The NDA has done a lot to dent that trust. The UPA regime must undo the damage, bring back accountability and weed lies out of statistics.
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