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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Information, not emotions: India needs reforms based on data and analysis-Arvind Singhal
-The Economic Times

The India of today would, perhaps, be among the most emotion-driven societies in the world. There would have been nothing wrong per se in this if emotions determined how an individual were to live his or her life, and influenced personal decisions. The big danger is when emotions become the Rosetta Stone to interpret the current and emerging needs of the nation, putting aside facts, objectivity, scientific temperament and even ideology.

The most recent 'debates' and, indeed, even the political and civil society's articulated position on economic, political and social reforms seem to be founded on emotions and beliefs rather than on hard data, rigorous analysis and scientific interpretations. Perhaps the most disconcerting of all the recent ones is the one that relates to FDI in retail. In the din, facts have been substituted with fiction both by the proponents and the antagonists and, in the process, the bigger issue on the need for India to have an efficient, quick-response producer to consumer distribution system is completely lost.

Likewise, the debate on reforms in the education sector seems to have been hijacked by the superfluous issue relating to 'profit' orientation and entry of foreign universities rather than the bigger issue about aligning the entire educational infrastructure (public- and privately-owned) to the current and future needs of the country (both vocational and higher education), and then creating an appropriate framework to bridge both the quality and the quantity gaps wherever they exist. Likewise, there are many other equally-critical challenges that India faces today, and all of them are on the trajectory to becoming much more acute if immediate visionary and bold action is not taken.

India now needs enlightened leadership and strong governance than perhaps at any time in the last 2,500 years. India's diversity reinforces the need to have a vibrant democracy and also the challenges involved in arriving at some acceptable consensus on different issues within a reasonable time frame.

This is where India's failure to create world-class, politically- and financially-independent think tanks hurts: they can provide facts and intellect-based framework to the politicians, planners and other policy-decision makers on various Indian - and then south Asian - economic and social issues.

The ideal 'think tank' for India would have to be conceptualised specifically keeping the country's - and the neighbouring countries' - ground realities, the most critical of which is the near absence of institutions and mechanisms to collect, collate and disseminate data covering at least a large part of the spectrum of human activity. What goes around for data in India is largely a combination of outdated figures, a lot of guesswork and intellectually-flawed interpretation and extrapolation.

For instance, none of the major ministries such as agriculture, human resource development, healthcare, housing and urban development, and energy can provide accurate and current data on what is the true occupational distribution of the population, the availability and demand-supply gaps between the needed and projected skill sets, the needed and projected demand-supply gaps relating to food, energy, clean water, sanitation, waste management, intra-city and intra-country transportation, housing, office, education, hospitals, retail and other such physical spaces from the point of view of the individual citizen.

In fact, the Planning Commission and various other government departments are ill-equipped to collect and collate high-quality and real-time data, and not equipped atall to connect India's ground realities and challenges with appropriate inputs for policymaking.

It is, therefore, no surprise that it is becoming nearly impossible to arrive at any kind of consensus on what India needs to do. It is, also, no surprise that emotional outbursts and political one-upmanship and expediency now pass for debate and discussion within (and outside) legislatures.

This ideal think tank has to be set up through a generous philanthropic support from within India itself with no absolutely strings attached. There are several illustrious examples and role models to learn from, e.g., Brookings Institution and Rand Corporation.

However, unlike most institutions, the Indian one shouldhave the know-how to conduct cutting-edge primary research and advanced analytics - beyond usage of classical statistical tools - which should be the bedrock for ideation on India's current and future needs across various economic and social issues, and to enable it to provide a very sound fact and information-based framework to policymakers.

An initial corpus of no more than 1,000 crore, some institutional land from the government, a visionary director and a top-calibre non-political governing board is what is needed to make a start. Hopefully, India would soon see some progress on this front.

(The author is chairman of Technopak Advisors)