Data in India is always released with some lag, most with a year lag. For example, crime statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau are, in recent years, released with up to a year lag, health and nutrition data such as the National Family Health Survey are collected with every three years and published months later.
One of the reasons why India releases data with a year lag is due to the large number of entries and the time required to collect data nationwide, according to this report by Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP)a human rights movement based in Mumbai.
Big data takes time [to collect and analyse] and India lacks adequate data management and analytics capacity for big data, said Avani Kapur, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research, where she leads the Accountability Initiative.
However, many datasets are over a year behind schedule. For example, ‘Basic road statistics‘, a report prepared by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, was last published in 2018-2019.
“Data (especially census data) counts for voting, for Finance Committee transfers [of funds from the Union government to the states] and even for primary health centers, as PHC is decided on population-based standards,” says Professor S. Chandrashekhar of the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai.
From the determination of number of schoolsand primary health care centers to electoral districts, data is essential for public policy. Of the datasets listed above, the census of india, Household consumption expenditure survey and Poverty estimates are the most crucial. These datasets have an impact on the creation of other datasets. For example, experts have raised questions about the future of socio-economic caste census data given the backlog in census data collection.
The delay in releasing data is impacting government plans and programs and resulting in unreliable estimates from other consumer, health and employment surveys, which rely on census data to determine policy and well-being measures, according to experts.
Jthe census is a ten-year survey that determines, down to the village level, population, literacy and migration, among other aspects of the Indian population. The 2021 census was deferred Due to the nationwide Covid-19 induced lockdowns, and even though restrictions have been lifted by central and state governments, the timing of the next census is unclear.
On December 14, 2022, the Minister of State for the Interior, Nityanand Rai, Told the Rajya Sabha that the government had, until then, spent Rs 24.84 crore on developing mobile and web applications, a portal and other census-related activities.
Household consumption expenditure survey is conducted every five years by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) and provides insight into household consumption patterns and levels. These surveys assist the Union as well as state governments in planning and policy formulation. The latest survey data of this type are available from 2011-2012. The government had decided not to go out data from the 2017-2018 survey, pointing to “data quality issues”. Training on the data collection process for the 2022-23 survey began in July 2022, according to this Release of the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation.
Poverty estimates: The former Planning Commission had been publish data on the number of people below the poverty line every five to six years since 1973-74. The latest estimates for 2011-2012, based on Tendulkar’s poverty line, were released in July 2013. “After that, no official estimate of poverty in India was released,” according to a 2020 report. draft copy published by the Ministry of Rural Development.
Experts point to political manipulation by the government as one of the main reasons for the delay in releasing the data. “Data complicates policy-making because it makes decision-making all the more difficult, especially for a party that comes to power with a rigid and unrealistic platform, which generates pressure to delay or even manipulate data. says Vikas Kumar, an associate professor at Azim Premji University who teaches a course on the political economy of government statistics.
Kumar also points out that the political manipulation of surveys and their results is not new; successive governments have done so, but the scale and frequency of interference has increased over the past decade. For example, the 2001 religion data was not released until after the 2004 Lok Sabha elections that brought the United Progressive Alliance-I (UPA-I) to power. The 2011 census was conducted by UPA-II, which delayed the release of religion-based data that would have been ready as early as April 2013, Kumar said. It was released in 2015.
Delays in releasing data can be attributed to the government’s statistical system’s reluctance to deal with public scrutiny and political interference, a 2020 study finds paper co-written by Vikas Kumar. He adds that the growing communalization of politics has specifically affected the timeliness of census data on identity.
Kumar also pointed to the gradual weakening of the infrastructure of government statistical agencies from the 1970s. 1990 when, as part of structural adjustment, the government had to tighten its belt. This led to budget cuts for politically insignificant departments like statistics, resulting in a hiring freeze and a delay in the reforms needed to cope with changes in the political economy after liberalisation,” Kumar said.
The backlog in government data in India is part of a larger problem. Experts also point to other concerns such as accessibility of available data, formatting issues, data quality issues, and retrieval of data after publication.
Data Formats
Very often, the available data is unusable, as it is published in formats such as PDFs and sometimes as scanned images. “There is a wealth of data available. The government should make it available in an easy and accessible way, where one can download it and have it in API (Application Programming Interface) format,” Chandrashekhar said. Most data, when first entered on government websites, is available in Excel or CSV (comma-separated values file) format, but is not publicly available in the same format, says Chandrashekhar.
Quality issues
The Health Management Information System data published by the Department of Health and Family Welfare is a public portal where data from over 200,000 public health facilities – most government run and rural – across India are uploaded every month. Data currently available dates back to 2008 and is available down to the sub-district level for each state, according to the analysis report of 2019-20.
But HMIS data does not always match that of other datasets.
For example, the National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-16), an independently conducted survey, showed that India’s vaccination coverage was 62%; where the performance of many developed states has deteriorated. For a comparable period (2014-2015), the HMIS showed that the percentage of fully immunized children was consistently above 100%, as IndiaSpending reported in May 2019.
Data quality issues were also reported in other reports such as medical certification of cause of death reports issued by the civil registration system; Only a fifth of deaths in 2019 were medically certifiedand most often with the underlying cause of death recorded incorrectly, such as IndiaSpending reported in June 2020.
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Data deletion
Cases of deletion of data from the public domain have also been reported. In August 2020, IndiaSpending used HMIS data to show that childhood vaccinations as well as adult access to drugs and treatments for life-threatening illnesses fell sharply between March and May 2020. Following the publication of the article, the data have become unavailable on the HMIS website, as we reported in July 2021. The data was then released on August 2, 2021, but it still remains “provisional”.
There have been instances where data has been collected but not published. For example, the government has clarified that he has no proposal to publish the socio-economic and caste census.
This article is written by Prachi Salve, who holds two master’s degrees: in economics from the University of Mumbai and in development studies from the University of Sussex, UK. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from St. Xaviers College, Mumbai. She has been a research assistant at the Institute of Development Studies (UK) and the Young Foundation (UK). She also worked for Greenpeace India in the fundraising division.
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