We need to identify the gaps in official data and analysis: Ansari
He was delivering, here today, the inaugural address at the International Seminar on ‘Social Statistics’ organized by Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), Patna.
Governor of Bihar Ram Nath Kovind, the Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, the Representative of UNICEF to India, Louis-Georges Arsenault, the Representative of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Usha Kiran Tarigopula, Prabhat P. Ghosh, the Country Director, IGC India-Bihar, Anjan Mukherji, the Member Secretary, ADRI, Shaibal Gupta were also present on the occasion.
The Vice President said that statistics has always been intimately linked to the social dimensions of the State.
The relevance and effectiveness of policy judgments depended on the quality of data and the efficacy of analysis and interpretation and it was important therefore that public institutions had access to the best social statistics and statistical analysis, he added.
The Vice President said that while the discipline of statistics in India boasts a separate Ministry - the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, a separate arm of bureaucracy – Indian Statistical Service (ISS), a number of information gathering mechanisms such as the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) and a vast array of central and state government departments engaged in the task of collecting and analyzing data, concerns have been raised about the quality of data being generated as also about the duplication of efforts to collect statistics across various government departments, inaccessibility of national data archives and the infringement of privacy by government’s data collection machinery.
Some of the criticism of Indian public statistics, especially when it comes to measurement of crosscutting social issues such as gender disparity, inequality, poverty and growth seems valid, he added.
The Vice President said that every new set of statistics has to be put to test in order to assess its validity and usefulness.
He acknowledged that there are no easy answers to these challenges and urged the experts gathered to shed light on them and suggest solutions or correctives.
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