We are getting information from more robust sources: T C A Anant

Interview with Chief Stastician, Govt of India

As the country's economic growth stands revised to a much higher 6.6 per cent in 2013-14, from the 4.9 per cent estimated earlier due to revision in the base year, the government's chief statistician, T C A Anant, says all these numbers must be read with caution before any interpretation. For instance, he tells Ishan Bakshi, it is premature to say the economy bottomed out earlier than in 2013-14. Edited excerpts:

The revised estimates with the new base now show a higher growth rate in 2013-14. Does this suggest the economy bottomed out earlier and that the turnaround happened in 2013-14?

It is difficult to say. That's much harder to calculate, as you would need a much longer time series for that. All we can say is that 2013-14 does show a higher growth rate than 2012-13 but whether we can read more, it's premature to say.

The mining and manufacturing sectors have seen significant revision from the previous estimates. What additional data sources were used in these sectors?

We were relying principally on ASI (Annual Survey of Industries) for organised manufacturing. ASI is an establishment-based approach. We are now combining that with the disaggregated data we gather from the MCA (ministry of company affairs) data base, which enables us to get a picture for the corporate manufacturing sector.

For informal activities, we are taking data from NSS (National Sample Survey) and household surveys for employment to generate value-added estimates for the informal sector in the base year. This is an improvement from the past, where the informal sector was moved by a number of criteria which were different in different segments of the informal sector. Ideally, we would have liked a data base which gave us the informal sector every year but we don't have that. We are constrained to visualise this through informal means.

In the services sector, what additional data sources have been used?

MCA for corporate services. Service tax collection is included as part of the tax collection data base. We are getting information on growth rates through that. This is in addition to the NSS data sources.

Has a new list of goods and services been added?

The list is the same. It's just that we are getting information on that list from more robust sources. What we used earlier also had financial services, insurance, banking. But we are now capturing insurance by data from Irda (the sector regulator), pensions from PFRDA (the regulator), mutual funds from Sebi (again, the regulator here). A lot of these organisations have developed data bases which at the time of the 2004-05 data series were not as robust, nor with that degree of detail that we were in a position to access and use these. We have been working with these agencies ever since they have been developing their e-governance data bases and this time around, we felt that we could incorporate a much larger segment of it.