-The Telegraph The merger of two statistics bodies would bring such data more directly under the control of the government During the last five years, there have been a number of controversies over economic data presented by the government and by relatively autonomous bodies like the National SAMple Survey Office. The controversies have been quite sharp, leading to two senior members of the National Statistical Commission resigning earlier this year. These controversies,...
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Revealed: River of anonymous election cash that flowed to Calcutta -Anita Joshua
-The Telegraph Figures in May take the total amount of money invested in this opaque source of funding since January to Rs 4,794 crore Electoral bonds accounting for the maximum amount of political donations in India in May were sold in Calcutta, according to information accessed by a citizen through the Right to Information route. Of the bonds worth Rs 822 crore that were sold in select outlets of the State Bank of...
More »The great Indian GDP debate, explained in five charts -Pramit Bhattacharya
-Livemint.com If there is no way to tell which part of the economy is doing well and which is not, policymakers will continue to have to rely on rough proxies and their intuition for decision-making A month after statisticians from the National SAMple Survey Office (NSSO) published a report exposing holes in one of the key databases used in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) calculations the controversy around India’s new GDP series...
More »'Non-ODF areas 13 times more prone to ground water pollution' -Dipak K Dash
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Villages where people still defecate in open face nearly 13 times higher risk of faecal contamination of ground water as compared to open defecation free (ODF) villages, says a study by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The assessment has also found that risk of ground water contamination in Bihar, one of the states which is yet to be declared ODF, is maximum at nearly 36%. The study,...
More »Pronab Sen, former chief statistician of India, interviewed by Kabir Agarwal and Anuj Srivas (TheWire.in)
-TheWire.in "I think the fact that the whole [NSSO] exercise began with a fundamental premise of keeping it comparable, that has been forgotten." The fierce debate over India’s unemployment figures came to a head last week, when a jobs data report by the National SAMple Survey Office (NSSO) was finally made public. This report has been a source of contention ever since two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigned allegedly...
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