Comment by Riaz Haq on July 29, 2023 at 4:40pm

Unhappy With Data Sets,' Modi Govt Suspends Director of Institute Which Prepares NFHS

See how BJP manipulates data — gives fake reality
Modi suspends Director of Institute that said:
1. India was nowhere close to being open defecation free.
2. 40% households did not have access to clean cooking fuel
3. Anaemia in India is on the rise .

https://twitter.com/jawharsircar/status/1685208148104396800?s=20


---------------

The Union government has been known for its very uneasy relationship with data. It has missed a deadline for the decadal Census. Its handling of Consumption Expenditure series and then the timing of the release of unemployment data has been strongly criticised in the past.


https://thewire.in/government/ks-james-nfhs-modi-government-data-se...

New Delhi: In an unprecedented move, the Union government has suspended the director of the International Institute for Population Sciences, K.S. James, citing an irregularity in recruitment, sources have told The Wire.

The International Institute for Population Sciences or IIPS prepares the National Family Health Surveys and does other such important exercises on the behalf of the Indian government. The IIPS comes under the Union health ministry.

The Wire reached out to the ministry but has not received a response yet. The story will be updated as and when the ministry responds.

However, an IIPS source at the department of public health and mortality studies has confirmed to The Wire that a suspension letter has been issued and that further details would come on Monday.

Sources told The Wire that James had been asked by the government to resign earlier as the government was not happy with certain data sets that came up in the surveys conducted by the IIPS.

However, he was reluctant to step down for reasons being given, they said.

he letter of suspension was sent to James on the evening of July 28, today.

nconvenient data?

For a government that believes in strong and ‘positive’ data, to work in tandem with its political campaign for electoral victories, the NFHS-5 had thrown up several data sets inconvenient for the government.

For example, it showed that India was nowhere close to being open defecation free – a claim that this government, including the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, often makes. Nineteen percent of households do not use any toilet facility, meaning that they practice open defecation, the NFHS-5 had pointed out. There is not a single state or Union Territory, except for Lakshadweep, where 100% of the population has access to a toilet, it had said.

The NFHS-5 had also showed that more than 40% households did not have access to clean cooking fuel – thus questioning the claims of success of the Ujjwala Yojana. It said in rural areas, more than half the population, 57%, does not have access to LPG or natural gas.

The NFHS-5 had also said anaemia in India was on the rise, and there have been some recent reports that the government was mulling to drop the anaemia measurement for NFHS-6.

Recently, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, Shamika Ravi, had written an op-ed in the Indian Express claiming that data collection for NFHS and other such surveys was flawed. Her article was criticised in another op-ed by Amitabh Kundu and P.C. Mohanan, published in the newspaper.

James was appointed the director of the Mumbai-based institute in 2018. He has a postdoctoral degree from Harvard Centre for Population and Development. Prior to joining the IIPS, he was professor of population studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has held a couple of leadership positions.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 29, 2023 at 5:55pm

India's impressive GDP data has some puzzling elements


https://www.moneycontrol.com/europe/?url=https://www.moneycontrol.c...


Tepid consumption

After posting year-on-year growth of 2.2 percent in October-December, private final consumption expenditure did pick up some pace in January-March, but only to 2.8 percent. According to Rahul Bajoria, managing director and head of emerging markets Asia (ex-China) economics at Barclays, the rise in private consumption "appears weaker" than what high-frequency indicators suggest.

Further, this weakness "does not reconcile with the robust value-added growth of consumption-led sectors like Trade, Hotels, Transport and Communication services", Madhavi Arora, lead economist at Emkay Global Financial Services, said in a note.

The 'Trade, Hotels, Transport, Communication, and Services related to broadcasting' segment posted gross value added (GVA) growth of 9.1 percent in January-March, second only to the 10.4 percent expansion reported by construction.

GDP-GVA divide

If GDP growth sharply surprised on the upside, GVA growth outperformed even that, coming in at 6.5 percent in January-March.

GDP is the sum of GVA and indirect taxes, net of subsidies. As such, higher GVA growth is suggestive of a contraction in net indirect taxes.

However, the latest data from the Controller General of Accounts (CGA) shows the Centre's expenditure on major subsidies was Rs 1.8 lakh crore in January-March—up only 3 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, indirect tax collections increased by 7.3 percent over the same period. On a net basis, indirect taxes were 6 percent higher last quarter. It is only if Integrated Goods and Services Tax collections are excluded that the indirect tax mop-up is lower by 1.4 percent in January-March on a year-on-year basis.

Rising discrepancies

A curious subhead of the GDP data is 'discrepancies', used to explain any difference between the GDP calculated through the income and expenditure methods.

In January-March, the discrepancies amounted to a negative Rs 1.28 lakh crore, implying that the GDP arrived at from the expenditure side is greater than that from the income side. Whether this is indicative of demand being overestimated is anybody's guess.

What can be said without uncertainty is that the size of discrepancies, whether negative or positive, is rising, with its absolute value now at a six-quarter high. This leaves plenty of room for future revisions in the headline GDP growth number.

Constant revisions

This conveniently brings us to where we started: How did all economists not read it right?

"The reason everybody got this wrong is the alarming regularity with which the data is getting revised," noted Kunal Kundu, India economist at Societe Generale.

"The release of October-December data saw a revision of data for the previous quarters over the past three years. The latest release once again saw a revision of recently revised quarterly data, making forecasting a rather hazardous task," Kundu added.

Constant revisions have indeed been the bane for policymakers as well as economists. After data for October-December, released in February, showed weak private consumption growth in the quarter, V Anantha Nageswaran, the chief economic adviser to the government, was at pains to point out that "data revision to the prior years has made a 6 percent growth rate come down to 2 percent".

Comment

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page