-The Indian Express GDP growth rates for pre-2011-12 years, making it impossible to compare the new growth data with the growth during the UPA years. New Delhi: From a new gross domestic product (GDP) series to a revised Index of Industrial Production and inflation indices, alongside fresh interventions including payroll reporting based on EPFO data, statistical measurement tools to gauge economic development underwent some change over the past four years. In the...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...

-PTI Seventy five per cent households across 13 states feel that the level of corruption has increased or remained the same during the last one year, while 27 per cent confessed to paying a bribe to avail public services in the last one year, according to a new survey. The 'India Corruption Study' conducted by the Centre For Media Studies covered more than 2,000 households from over 200 rural and urban clusters...

The present NDA government led by the BJP at the Centre came to power in 2014 on the planks of development and anti-corruption. However, contrary to PM Narendra Modi's slogan of 'Na Khaunga, Na Khaane Doonga' (meaning ‘would not take bribes, nor would let anyone accept bribe’), a new report by the Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies (CMS) shows that almost three-fourth of Indian households think that the level of...