Bad Score Keeping
On November 15, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) announced that it will not publish the results of a national household consumer expenditure survey carried out by its wing, the National Statistics Office (NSO), during the period July 2017 to June 2018 on account of “data quality issues”.
The MoSPI decision will impact the government’s GDP base year revision plans as the scrapped data set is crucial in revising the base year for calculating India’s economic (GDP) growth. The absence of this data will also deny India an opportunity to understand the changes that have happened in areas of poverty, food consumption, nutrition, malnutrition and a host of other issues during the last six years, as that was when a similar exercise was carried out last to generate comparable data points.
This is also the second instance, in recent times, of the results of a survey-based data analysis, prepared by an official government agency, being junked by the government itself. Results of the periodic labour force survey (PLFS) of NSO,
