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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The politics of numbers -PC Mohanan

The politics of numbers -PC Mohanan

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published Published on Nov 19, 2019   modified Modified on Nov 19, 2019
-The Indian Express

Government data always come with limitations. Now, they have a political dimension

A new data-related controversy has erupted after the government aborted the publication of the report of the household consumer expenditure survey (CES) conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) during 2017-18. This survey is one of the oldest series of surveys — undertaken by NSSO since the 1950s — and is the precursor to the present Living Standard Measurement Surveys, highly favoured and supported by international agencies like the World Bank for estimating poverty. In India, the data from this survey has been the basis for estimating poverty numbers ever since the topic of poverty took centrestage in our political and economic discourse. Most Indian economists will be familiar with the CES data and its limitations. All along, there were also concerns about the potential under-reporting and reliability of the consumption data due to the increasing divergence between the household-level data and the corresponding consumption data provided by the national accounts. It appears from the government’s press note that it has also checked the report with the actual production of goods and services. The late B S Minhas, who was chairman of the NSSO governing council, was the first to explore these divergences. His findings did show that the divergences were not entirely due to underreporting in the surveys.

That the collection of data to arrive at the monthly household consumption expenditure estimate on all goods and services is not an easy task is well recognised. Economists and survey experts have spent considerable time to understand the data limitations and to improve the data collection procedures. In fact, the CES data and the survey methodology have generated a large amount of literature, some of which is documented in The Great Indian Poverty Debate edited by Angus Deaton and Valerie Kozel. The under-reporting of consumption due to a lapse in recall and the adoption of an appropriate recall period was also studied in great detail by NSSO. This writer was once part of a large pilot study where the respondents were provided with containers to measure cereals, pulses and milk consumed by them and a notebook to write down the quantity consumed on a daily basis. Households were also given a packet of salt considering that salt consumption was invariant to income levels. The salt remaining at the end of the week was measured to get the most accurate estimate of salt consumption as a control variable. These were genuine efforts to understand the reporting limitations raised by data users that peaked after the 1999-2000 survey when the NSSO used two recall periods.

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The Indian Express, 19 November, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/nsso-consumer-expenditure-survey-report-data-politics-of-numbers-6126253/


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