India’s once-vaunted statistical infrastructure is crumbling

The reasons are worryingly familiar

School children await bus transport beneath a billboard with photographs of successful students outside a school in Nooranad, Kerala, India, Friday, March 4, 2022. Slowly but steadily, life in South Asia is returning to normal, and people hope the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is behind them. (AP Photo/R S Iyer)

May 19th 2022|DELHI

The modern Indian state has a proud statistical heritage. Soon after the country gained independence in 1947, the government resolved to achieve its development through comprehensive five-year plans. The strategy, though economically inadvisable, nonetheless required the creation of a robust data-gathering apparatus. In 1950 PC Mahalanobis, the leading light of Indian statistics, designed the National Sample Survey, which sent staff to the far corners of the vast country to jot down data regarding its mostly illiterate citizens. The survey’s complexity and scope seemed “beyond the bounds of possibility”, reckoned one American statistician.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Half-measures”