-Newsclick.in The arguments put forward by the two government advocates to disparage the NSSO’s thwarted report only serve to create a smokescreen so that any meaningful debate on unemployment becomes impossible. In 1965, P. C. Mahalanobis, who founded India’s modern statistical system, wrote a famous article titled “Statistics as a Key Technology” in the journal The American Statistician. One argument in the paper was as follows. Prior to the emergence of science...

  Growth in rural wages not only indicates economic prosperity of the masses, it is also considered important so as to generate effective demand for goods and services, which is produced by various sectors of the economy. When money becomes available in the hands of rural workers due to government spending on programmes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), it generates demand for commodities. The production of commodities...

-The Hindu There needs to be robust infrastructure for official statistics so that governments do not suppress inconvenient truths Over the past two weeks, headlines have focussed on declining employment between 2011-12 and 2016-17; loss of jobs under the National Democratic Alliance government, particularly post-demonetisation; and the government’s refusal to release a report using the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) documenting this decline, leading to resignations of two members of the National...

-The Indian Express My resignation from National Statistical Commission was the last act in a long story of disregard for its reports William Setzer, in the working paper, “Politics and Statistics: Independence, Dependence or Interaction”, published by the UN, lists several possible areas where political interference in official data generation and publication can happen. One of these is the extent and timing of release of data. He cites several examples. Most...

-The Indian Express Repeated government interventions in official data release run the risk of denting market trust in it The controversy over two top functionaries of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigning in protest over the NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) withholding its new employment survey adds to a growing list of government interventions in data releases. There is a common theme — the government is seen to take an adversarial...