Delay in release of official statistics has dire consequences for addressing job crisis

It is counterproductive even for the government because effective policy-making requires proper knowledge of existing conditions and problems.

Delay in release of official statistics has dire consequences for addressing employment crisis — There are huge vacancies in existing posts across central and state governments — it is estimated that there are around 2.4 million vacant posts in the central government and many multiples of that for the state governments combined. (Illustration: CR Sasikumar)

The attacks by the Narendra Modi government on many of India’s institutions have been noted, but the destruction of India’s statistical system was not adequately recognised or condemned. That is, not until the latest revelations on how the government refusing to release the NSSO’s employment survey for 2017-18 led to the resignation of the last two remaining independent members of the National Statistical Commission.

This attack on official statistics is obviously important because it denies citizens access to reliable data on what is going on in the economy and assess the government’s performance. This is sad because India had managed to build one of the more impressive statistical systems in the developing world, despite having a large informal economy and many forms of economic activity not captured by conventional measures. And it is counterproductive even for the government because effective policy-making requires proper knowledge of existing conditions and problems.

The list of such transgressions is long, and gets longer daily. The messing up of the new series of GDP data became evident when the much-delayed back series was sought to be manipulated for the purpose of showing the current government in better light than the previous one. Various other data are simply withheld or sought to be massaged before their official release, from the government’s own reports about the status of the Clean Ganga campaign to the actual results of initiatives like the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or the Ujjwala Yojana or the rural electrification campaign. Fiscal data cannot be trusted because the central government hides its deficits by shifting expenditure off-budget, pretending to sell some PSUs to other PSUs, or simply not paying its dues to programmes for employment or food security. The National Crime Records Bureau has stopped publishing its reports for the last two years. The RBI is refusing to disclose information on banks that are not complying with regulatory guidelines. Even the data on the supposedly transparent MGNREGA website contains a fudge that hides the extent to which the government is not providing work even when it is formally demanded.

The self-created mess is worst for official data on employment. First, the NSSO was made to scrap the quinquennial large labour force survey on the grounds that it would be replaced with periodic labour force surveys that would provide “real-time data”. The report of the 2017-18 survey is ready and was cleared by the National Statistical Commission, but the government is not releasing it. Similarly, the Labour Bureau’s report on the sixth annual employment-unemployment survey, also for 2016-17, has not been publicly released by the government, even though it was supposedly cleared by the minister in-charge.

We can only speculate about whether this is because these surveys show stagnation or decline in employment in the recent past, as suggested by independent surveys. But they still pertain mostly to the period before demonetisation, which is widely accepted to have wreaked havoc on India’s informal economy and livelihoods of the poor. Employment does not appear to have recovered since then. Indeed, the large survey conducted by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) suggests a steep fall in employment in 2018, of as much as 11 million jobs, mostly those of rural women and overwhelmingly among less educated workers. While these data are still preliminary, the overall picture is gloomy.

But even as they prevent the public release of potentially incriminating statistics, government ministers claim that there are no reliable official data on employment in the country. Instead, they — and the prime minister himself — seek to generate hype about employment creation on the basis of completely misleading indicators.