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Informist, Friday, Sep 20, 2024

 

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

 

NEW DELHI - In what began as a discussion on the increasing unresponsiveness of high-income Indians to surveys conducted by the government, members of Resident Welfare Associations from the Capital today criticised the statistics ministry for asking difficult-to-answer questions while also citing issues related to privacy of personal information as a problem.

 

At a 'brainstorming session' on 'non-response to surveys by high-income groups and gated societies', officials from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation first highlighted that their surveys are seeing a "substantial" increase in the non-response rate from high-income Indians, with access to gated societies proving to be a particularly difficult challenge. The non-response rate has been increasing in both urban and rural areas, with the urban non-response rate twice as high as the rural figure, ministry officials said.

 

"The 68th round of NSS (National Sample Survey) was conducted in 2011-12 and the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey in 2022-23...you can see a substantial increase in the non-response rate during this period... The non-response rate is the highest among the top income categories," Amitava Saha, a deputy director general in the statistics ministry involved in the Household Survey Division, said.

 

"What we find is that non-response is predominantly an urban phenomenon, although it is happening in rural areas but at a much lower magnitude," Saha added.

 

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.

 

According to data shared by the statistics ministry today, 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%.

 

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 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.

 

OFFICIALS' GROUSE

Speaking at the discussion, Saurabh Garg, the statistics ministry secretary, said that while privacy of data has often been cited as one of the reasons behind the public's reluctance to participate in surveys, the ministry's track record over the 70 years showed that data it had collected was not used for any other purpose.

 

"I think data privacy, anonymisation of data is something which we are always cognisant of and we want to ensure that whatever data is given, it remains secure and safe," Garg said.

 

Chairmen of the Delhi and Tamil Nadu Real Estate Regulatory Authority, also present at the discussion to weigh in on field officers of the statistics ministry unable to gain access to gated societies on certain occasions, criticised residents of these apartment buildings.

 

Branding it a challenge to get responses from residents of these societies, Shiv Das Meena, chairman of Tamil Nadu Real Estate Regulatory Authority, said that while this segment was "most vocal" on social media, they displayed a reluctance to record their views in a structured manner to improve policy and decision-making.

 

"We have a lot of these 'islands of prosperity' in our cities...And the concentration of such 'islands of prosperity' in the urban areas is gradually increasing. And these are locations from where it is very difficult to get any information," Meena said.

 

Anand Kumar, chairman of Delhi Real Estate Regulatory Authority, also bemoaned the decline in the sincerity with which people respond to surveys, saying people had become "individualistic".

 

The issue of a high non-response rate by richer Indians in government surveys was one of the criticisms 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, 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 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.

 

RESIDENTS HIT BACK

While members of Resident Welfare Associations (RWA), invited by the statistics ministry to the discussion to help find solutions to the problem, admitted that awareness about these surveys and their importance from a policy perspective was lacking among the public, they also complained that apathy was not the sole issue. Taking the example of the ministry's debt and investment survey, an RWA member said it was natural for people to hesitate in answering questions on how much gold and number of shares they held.

 

"If people don't tell the income tax department about these things, why will they tell you?"

 

Other issues cited by members of Resident Welfare Associations in the statistics ministry's field officers not getting access to gated societies included security-related issues and the complex nature of the questions being asked. "If you ask us how much tea we drank in the last week or how many cigarettes we have smoked, who is going to remember that?" a member said.

 

The type of questions being asked by the statistics ministry also attracted criticism, with the aforementioned RWA member saying people can find it difficult to answer questions related to alcohol and cigarette consumption in front of their family members on account of the conservative nature of Indian society.

 

Privacy of data was also raised as an issue, with another RWA member saying answering questions honestly was difficult when the respondent's name and contact number were being noted. Nikhil Hawelia, an official from Confederation of Real Estate Developers Associations of India, CREDAI, asked the statistics ministry to market privacy of data "very, very well".

 

A source from the statistics ministry later said that not taking down respondents' personal details could be considered for certain surveys.  End

 

Reported by Siddharth Upasani

Edited by Vandana Hingorani

 

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