-The Hindu Facts do not support the argument that India has a robust system of registering births and deaths The World Health Organization (WHO)’s estimate of excess deaths due to COVID-19 in India triggered several responses. Among them was the response of several State Health Ministers, who slammed the WHO and asserted that India has a “robust, legal and transparent system for data collection and COVID mortality surveillance”. This new-found love for the...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Madhya Pradesh saw nearly three times more deaths than normal after second wave of Covid-19 struck -Rukmini S
-Scroll.in Official data on all-cause mortality in the state in April and May 2021 raises questions about the official Covid-19 death toll. Madhya Pradesh has seen a sharp spike in deaths in April and May 2021, nearly three times more than normal in these months in previous years, and far more than the official Covid-19 death toll, government data shows. Moreover, the deaths are not restricted to big cities like Indore and...
More »Limits of the SECC Data
-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...
More »Where is the caste data? -M Vijayanunni
-The Hindu By abdicating its responsibility to conduct the caste census and turning it into a poverty-cum-caste survey, the previous dispensation at the Centre made the exercise casual and perfunctory. This has been proved by the way the survey has turned out. In August 2010, Finance Minister and head of the Group of Ministers, Pranab Mukherjee, made a reassuring statement in Parliament on behalf of the government of India, that there would...
More »A count that just does not add up-A Srivathsan
-The Hindu Imprecise estimates of slums in the 2011 census could affect welfare programmes for least privileged groups The recently published census 2011 report on housing stock, amenities and assets in slums, the first of its kind in the country, reassuringly announced that the number of urban slums has declined and the percentage of households in slums has dropped from 23.5 (2001) to 17.4. On the face of it, this reduction appears...
More »