Numbers crunch

Government data has been so error-prone of late that it is worth wondering about not just the veracity of its numbers but the manner in which they are calculated, as journalists attending Tuesday’s press conference to announce the provisional export-import (exim) figures for July can attest. The presser degenerated into a messy affair when Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) Anup K Pujari read out incorrect trade deficit numbers. When a journalist pointed this out, Pujari’s unrepentant answer was, “Sorry, I calculated these only last night and I was sleepy.” He must have been extremely sleep-deprived because it transpired that there were errors in the total export numbers too and, consequently, in the growth percentages. Still, it’s hard to ascribe the problem of data errors to human error only. The practice of giving out the provisional exim numbers was started by former Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar. A $9-billion error in exports numbers occurred under his watch and that was due to a miscalculation by the electronic data recording system.