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Informist, Friday, Sep 20, 2024

--Statistics secy: Data privacy not an issue with our surveys

--CONTEXT: Statistics Secy Saurabh Garg at an event in Delhi

NEW DELHI - The surveys conducted by the statistics ministry are seeing a "substantial" increase in the non-response rate from high-income Indians, with access to gated societies proving to be particularly challenging. The non-response rate has been increasing for both urban and rural areas, with the urban non-response rate twice as high as the rural figure.

In a 'brainstorming session' in the capital today, officials from the statistics ministry said the urban non-response rate for the 2022-23 (Aug-Jul) Household Consumption Expenditure Survey had risen to 9.8% from 2.8% in the 75th round of the National Sample Survey, conducted in 2017-18 (Jul-Jun). Meanwhile, the figure for rural areas has risen to 4.1% from 1.5%.

As per data from the statistics ministry, the non-response rate was as high as 11.0% for the top category of respondents by affluence - called Class 1 - in urban areas in the 2022-23 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey, up from 3.3% in the 68th round of NSS surveys conducted in 2011-12 (Jul-Jun). Similarly, the rate for rural areas has tripled to 3.9% from 1.3% for those falling under the Class 1 category of affluency.

A rising non-response rate has the potential to reduce the sample size of the government's surveys. Any change in the original composition of the sample can make estimates arrived at from the survey less precise and not representative of the target population. This can lead to inappropriate conclusions being drawn and policies or decisions taken by the government not producing the desired results. Saurabh Garg, the statistics ministry secretary, said that while privacy of data has often been cited as one of the reasons behind the public reluctance to participate in surveys, the ministry's track record over the 70 years showed data it had collected was not used for any other purpose.

The issue of a high non-response rate by richer Indians in government surveys was one of the pieces of criticism levelled at the statistics ministry last year. In a newspaper column in July 2023, Shamika Ravi, a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, or PM-EAC, had said estimates from the statistics ministry's surveys "would over-represent the rural population and therefore systematically underestimate the improvements across the economy".

"In fact, what is evident from the analysis is that the greater the improvement on the ground, the greater will be the bias in the survey estimates," Ravi wrote.

The column by Ravi and others written by some of her colleagues on the PM-EAC evoked critical responses from former senior officials of the statistics ministry, including Pronab Sen, India's first chief statistician. The ensuing public debate on the quality of India's official statistics led to the government, in July 2023, repurposing the Sen-led Standing Committee on Economic Statistics into a Standing Committee on Statistics that would review the framework and address issues related to the subject, results, and methodology, among other aspects, of all the surveys of the statistics ministry.

However, the Sen-led standing committee was disbanded earlier this month on the grounds that the recently-formed steering committee for National Sample Surveys is doing much of the same work.

Also speaking at the brainstorming session today, Delhi-Real Estate Regulatory Authority Chairman Anand Kumar bemoaned a decline in the sincerity with which people respond to surveys, saying people had become "individualistic". Shiv Das Meena, chairman of the Tamil Nadu-Real Estate Regulatory Authority, noted that it was difficult to get information from "islands of prosperity", referring to gated societies.  End

Reported by Siddharth Upasani

Edited by Avishek Dutta and Akul Nishant Akhoury

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