Stats ministry to brainstorm data quality issues in 'chintan shivir'

The government will organise a two day ‘chintan shivir’ (brainstorming conclave) for its officials to deliberate on issues like sampling frames and data collection techniques and come up with solutions, amid a raging debate on the quality of official data. 

“The ministry is organising the first chintan shivir on 27th and 28th July with the objective to deliberate upon the pressing issues faced by the official statistical system in the country and suggest a way forward on these issues,” said a notification issued by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI) on Tuesday. 

The deliberations by MoSPI will see participation of officials from other ministries and departments, and will feature nine points of discussion, for which the participants have been tentatively distributed into nine groups. 

There will be deliberations on the challenges faced by the Centre in estimating the gross domestic products (GDP) and gross district domestic product by the states. 

There will also be discussions on identifying the gaps in National Sample Survey (NSS) surveys like timeliness, data quality, outdated frames, and inconsistencies with data sources. Other points of discussion on the agenda include challenges in estimating industrial production (IIP) and consumer price index (CPI) like base year revision and non-availability of consumption expenditure surveys. The event will also introduce technological elements in data collection, compilation, and dissemination of official statistics and standardising data and meta-data. 

Besides, there will be a status report on the implementation of various recommendations of various committees on system reforms including the Rangarajan commission. 

The move to organise a chintan shivir comes in the wake of the recent criticism of the quality of the official data that has largely come from the chairman and the members of the PM Economic Advisory Council (EAC-PM).

Shamika Ravi, member EAC-PM, in a recent article published in the Indian Express, said all major surveys in India that were conducted after 2011, and used the Census 2011 for the sampling frame, have overestimated the proportion of the rural population significantly. 

Following this, the government had renamed and expanded the scope of an existing standing committee headed by former chief statistician of India, Pronab Sen, as a measure to review the framework and results of all surveys brought before it by the MoSPI. The new Standing Committee on Statistics (SCoS) will have a two-year tenure for the chairman and its 16 members and will advise the MoSPI on survey methodology.

ON THE AGENDA

> Identifying the gaps in NSS surveys like timeliness, data quality, outdated frames, and inconsistencies with other data sources

> Challenges in estimating industrial production (IIP) and consumer price index (CPI) like base year revision and non-availability of consumption expenditure surveys

> Introducing technological elements in data collection, compilation and dissemination of official statistics

> Standardising data and meta-data across various data producers