India is no country for data - The Morning Context

5 min read

source

20 highlights

  • According to data collected by the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, a coalition of over 40 farmers’ unions, more than 500 farmers have died in the protest so far. Several newspapers that have followed the protests diligently have chronicled the deaths over the months.

  • In a written reply to Parliament during the monsoon session last month, agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that the government has no “record to suggest how many farmers died or fell ill during the ongoing agitation against the Centre’s three farm laws”.

  • In another written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, minister of state for health and family welfare Bharati Pravin Pawar said that “no deaths due to lack of oxygen have been specifically reported by states/union territories” during the second wave of COVID-19.

  • Last year, during one of the worst cases of human migration in recent history, it denied any information on the number of migrants who lost their jobs or died on their way home.

  • Less than a week after Pawar’s claim, the minister of state for finance Pankaj Chaudhary informed the Lok Sabha, the lower house, that there is no official estimate of the black money deposited in Swiss banks in the last decade. Two years ago, the same government said that it had struck an information-sharing agreement with the European country and received several sets of financial information from the banks there.

  • And it would still have been fine if not for a PTI report this June. The news agency reported that funds deposited by Indian individuals and firms in Swiss banks rose to 2.55 billion Swiss francs in 2020, the highest in 13 years, citing annual data from Switzerland’s central bank.

  • Continuing in the same vein in Parliament during the monsoon session, the minister of state for social justice and empowerment Ramdas Athawale told the lower house that no one died in the country of manual scavenging although “309 deaths have been reported during the last five years of people who undertook hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks”.

  • In June 2019, former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian released a research paper, arguing that India’s growth rates between March 2012 and March 2017 had been overestimated by about 2.5 percentage points due to a change in the methodology.

  • And we aren’t even talking about data on crimes, which have been published annually by the National Crime Records Bureau since 1953 but stopped after the 2018 report. Similarly, the National Human Rights Commission hasn’t published its annual report since the 2017-18 edition.

  • Data from the Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011 hasn’t been released yet. The list goes on.

  • There are several factors at work here. One, there is no pressure on the government to release data. In previous governments, this pressure came from civil society organizations, media houses and, finally, the opposition. This is how the BJP attacked the UPA government before it came to power.

  • And media debates are focused on issues like whether Neeraj Chopra is a Maratha or a Punjabi or whether he has a girlfriend or not, and are far removed from matters of the larger public good.

  • “This government has never admitted shortcomings or flaws in their policy design. And that’s where the problem lies. Because if you don’t accept the mistakes and take feedback, you will never improve.”

  • This government, says Mohanan, sees very little need for data. They want publicity, but not based on actual data. Only indicators or indices that are favourable to them are considered.

  • At the same time, the decision was made by the government even before formal approval by the central bank, according to the minutes of the Reserve Bank of India’s board meeting hours before Modi’s announcement on 8 November 2016.

  • “The government goes ahead and makes claims after which the officials find it very difficult to retrofit data accordingly and come up with alternative facts,” says Mohanan. “What options do they have other than just being silent?”

  • Independence is critical here because that’s the only way to ensure the sanctity and credibility of data. That is why in most robust democracies, the statistical agencies have been kept out of government control.

  • “We tried to build a similar system here, but it never happened,” says Mohanan. “So we still have the statistics department under a minister and a secretary who will decide if a set of data is good to be published or not.”

  • The same government that is reluctant to publish data in the public good is ready to share private data of citizens, like vehicle registration numbers and details including financing and insurance, for a price despite the issue of privacy and data protection looming large over such deals.

  • Democracies die behind closed doors. We need to ensure we keep knocking so that some doors open.

Graph View