Right to statistics

Have poverty levels increased in the country, or fallen? Has employment growth picked up, commensurate with the faster GDP growth, or is the country still seeing jobless growth? In other words, is India shining, as the NDA fatefully claimed it was when the country went to the polls two years ago, or is the aam aadmi in trouble, as the UPA made it out to be? While politicians can argue forever about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty on the basis of their personal or party predilections, without too much regard for the facts, the authoritative source of information on the subject is the National Sample Survey (NSS). So it is unfortunate that though the latest NSS round of data collection ended 11 months ago, in June 2005, the findings from processed data are still not available. The last authoritative data set is that of NSS 1999 (the 55th round), and that has been the subject matter of considerable controversy; there have been other survey rounds in between, but these have had smaller (“thin”) sample sets, and do not therefore have the same robustness.

The delay in releasing the data, collected in the first half of the last calendar year, is hard to understand, especially when the preliminary data for the 55th round (of 1999) were released within a few months of the data collection getting over in June 2000, and key results were published by December the same year. The results of the 2005 round, in sharp comparison, are nowhere to be seen. Some preliminary information which was supposed to have been made available to the Planning Commission by October last year has only now been given, and even this is reported to be incomplete—a few days ago, the Commission wrote to the NSSO, asking it for more complete information. It is understood that the preliminary data will be released only by September.

Inevitably, motives are being read into the delay. Even if everything is above board, the importance of timely data to settle current policy debates (some of them of a fairly fundamental nature) can hardly be over-emphasised. The UPA’s massive rural employment guarantee programme, for instance, is predicated on the view that there is a slump in employment growth. Since subsequent estimates, albeit on small samples, have indicated that the job market is growing as never before, the NSS 2005 would provide firmer ground for informed opinion. Similarly, much of the current debate on reservations for OBCs (other backward castes) will get anchored in firmer facts after the 2005 numbers are made public. Data on OBC education and jobs (the absolute numbers as well as the various categories) were first canvassed only in NSS-1999; data from NSS-2005 will therefore deliver for the first time a time series that will help point to some conclusions. For it so happens that the 2001 census did not canvass data for OBCs, though it did for the scheduled castes and tribes. While the NSS organisation is doing the right thing by ensuring that data are properly processed, surely the country needs the job done quickly as well.