Leaner, smarter Eco Survey likely

When Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presents the Economic Survey 2014-14 in Parliament this July, it will be lighter by 30 per cent and smarter than previous documents in the entire look and feel.

To make it more readable, the finance ministry plans to do away with historical data tables more than five years old. And, to make the content snappier by avoiding frequent reference to the Five-Year Plan and focusing only on the year that went by.

“We are trying a better design and layout, smaller graphics and using only recent years’ data. The content will also be sharper, where we will mainly talk about only last year’s performance and avoid repetition,” said a ministry official who did not wish to be identified.

The economic division of the ministry, which prepares the document, has asked all officers to reduce the number of pages in their respective chapters. The number and topic of most of the chapters will remain the same as last year. As the size of tables will be reduced drastically in the printed version, the ministry will retain the long tables in the online version. A hyperlink might be provided for this.

“A lot of tables which are spread across pages can be explained through a simple line graph,” said the official. He added the graph on the cover of the Survey, started by the present chief economist at the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, in 2010 when he was Chief Economic Advisor, might also be dropped. On the cover of Economic Survey 2009-10, Basu had put a diagram depicting the concept of “coupons equilibrium which plays an important role in providing the micro-foundations for Keynesian macroeconomics”. The practice was continued by his successor, Raghuram Rajan (now Reserve Bank of India chief). Last year’s Survey had depicted India’s share in world trade in comparison to China, Indonesia and Korea.

Last year’s Survey had 294 pages, along with 127 pages of statistical appendix, a total of 421. A 30 per cent reduction would mean 126 pages less. Thus, the Survey can be wound up within 300 pages.

The Survey of 2012-13, authored by Rajan, was also lighter than the previous year’s version by about 13 per cent. After he left for RBI at the beginning of September last year, there has been no appointment as Chief Economic Advisor. Ila Patnaik, recently appointed principal economic advisor, is coordinating it with Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram.

Apart from embellishing the cover of the Survey, Basu had tried to make the language of the document more simple and accessible but officials feel there is more scope, to also make it more meaningful. The ministry has asked officials to send their inputs on the Survey at the earliest, indicating it wants to be ready for the new minister in case the government decides to present the Budget in late June or early July.