-The Hindu The merger of the NSSO into the Central Statistics Office is a cause for concern The announcement that the government has decided to merge the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) into and under the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has caused both surprise and concern. What exactly the ‘merger’ means remains unclear. Recent attempts to question the veracity of National Sample Survey (NSS) data and the way the issue has been...

-Livemint.com The inside?story?of?the?decline?of a?globally renowned statistical system and its effect on Asia’s third largest economy New Delhi: Toothless. Powerless. Impotent. These are the adjectives used to describe India’s apex statistical organization, the National Statistical Commission (NSC). And these haven’t been hurled by its detractors but by three former members of the NSC who have been part of the commission at different points in time. The NSC shot to prominence in December last year after...

  The year-on-year (y-o-y) growth rate in Agri Gross Value Added (GVA) deflator (an alternative measure of inflation) shows a rising trend between 2005-06 and 2009-10. In other words, price rise pertaining to the agrarian sector accelerated during the period under discussion. This particular trend has been observed irrespective of whether one uses the GVA/GDP back-series data (Base 2011-12=100) that was computed by the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog (NITI Aayog)...

-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...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The government is committed to maintaining the credibility of statistical organisations and the NSSO employment data would be released by month-end, a senior official said Monday as he dismissed concerns about alleged political interference in statistical data. The senior government official's comments come against the backdrop of as many as 108 economists and social scientists alleged "political interference" in statistical data in the country and called for the restoration...