Vice-President Hamid Ansari expressed concern over the poor quality of data being generated and the shoddy training and duplication of efforts at different Government levels affecting the social statistics sector in India.
Delivering the keynote address after inaugurating the International Conference on Social Statistics in India on Friday, Ansari said the inaccessibility of national data archives and the infringement of privacy by the Government’s data collection machinery also marred the credibility of social statistics sector. The four-day conference has been organised by Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) as part of its silver jubilee celebrations.
Ansari said, “Criticism of Indian public statistics appeared to be valid when it came to measurement of cross-cutting social issues such as gender disparity, inequality, poverty and growth. Our public statistics have also attracted opprobrium on issues related to measurement of parameters relate to the service sector, the unorganised sector and unemployment figures. This is not only undermining the credibility of Indian statistics globally but also hurting the analysis of some of the most important elements of the Indian economy.”
As corrective measures to meet the social statistics challenges, the Vice-President stressed on the identification of the gaps in official data and analysis and determination of ways on how best to bridge them.
He said, “There is also the need to focus on maintaining data standards and improving the quality of our training and statistics education as, in the present open economies, a wrong data release can create market volatility and can have a cascading effect.”
Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar asked the Centre for the publication of Socio Economic Caste Census data. He explained that he was saying this not for caste-based politics but to erase the caste divide and discrimination.
He said “The ST-SC census has been carried out after Independence, Backward Castes census has not been done, depriving them of proportional representation and share in various walks of life.”
Nitish stressed the need of ensuring the quality of statistics to measure poverty. It should not only be on the basis of income or calorific value required by a human being but the development indices including education, health, environment and also indicators such as agricultural production and related economic indicators. He said, “Income alone cannot be the basis of poverty measurement.”
Governor Ram Nath Kovind said the agenda of social science research was quite large in an extremely problematic State like Bihar. At one hand, because of historical reasons, there are huge development deficits in several sectors, on the other, there are severe resource constraints, not just in terms of finances, but in terms of human resources as well.
Usha Kiran Tarigopula, Deputy Director Bihar Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said the foundation is working in partnership with the Bihar government in advancing its efforts to achieve the state’s socio-economic targets in the fields of maternal and child health, nutrition, women empowerment and agricultural development.
Unicef Representative to India louis-Georges Arsenault said a robust social statistics system was crucial to push SDGs and that the objective in this endeavour should be to “leave no one behind”.
Earlier, Prabhat P Ghosh, Director ADRI, was felicitated by the Vice-President. The citation was read by Nalanda University Vice-Chancellor Dr Gopa Sabharwal.
Shaibal Gupta, Member Secretary ADRI, delivered the welcome address while Prof Anjan Mukherji, Country Director, IGC India-Bihar, presided over the session.