-The Indian Express The immediate cause for suspecting the genuineness of survey responses is the divergence in the estimates of households with access to toilets. Differences between survey estimates and comparable data from administrative sources are not surprising. The survey data are believed to present a more realistic view, especially when it relates to access to public goods and services. Generally, the distrust is more on administrative data from implementing agencies. While...

-The New Indian Express The Survey of India plans to use drones to create a high-resolution map of every inch of India. It comes with unprecedented privacy and security challenges The Survey of India (SoI) has embarked upon an ambitious project of using drone imaging to create an ultra-high resolution spatial and topographic map of India. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, calls it the biggest endeavour in Indian...

-The Indian Express Five years down the line, official data shows that the progress of SAGY has been sluggish — about two-thirds of Lok Sabha MPs are yet to select gram panchayats under Phase-4 of the scheme. In his first Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY) as part of nation-building, urging Lok Sabha MPs...

-The Indian Express Government does well to constitute panel on economic statistics, and even better to include critics on it The Narendra Modi government deserves credit for constituting a new Standing Committee on Economic Statistics “to review the extant framework relating to data sources, indicators, concepts/definitions and other issues” connected with measurement of economic activity. Significantly, the panel is headed by the former chief statistician of India, Pronab Sen, and has at...

-Livemint.com Using India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) as a case study, new research shows social transfers may reduce labour supply, but increase wages A common belief about social transfers is that they make their recipients lazy, decrease labour supply and do not reduce poverty. According to research that examines India’s largest social transfer programme, the public distribution system (PDS), social transfers indeed reduce labour supply but this increases wages and alleviates poverty. In...