How the lockdown could be creating an economic data vacuum in India

It has impeded the govt's ability to collect numerical information, forcing it not to release key inflation figures

The government released truncated data for the month of April, due to lack of available numbers and limited wholesale transactions amid a nationwide lockdown.

The government didn’t release the inflation figures for manufactured products, which have a combined weight of 65 per cent in the index, something that many believe made the numbers unclear as the bulk of the index wasn’t there.

For manufactured products in the previous month, prices in the sector had risen by just 0.3 per cent, after rising by 0.4 per cent in February.

Days before that, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) released