Rangarajan's call for credible statistical system

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MAY 15. The Governor of Andhra Pradesh and the Chairman of the newly-constituted National Statistical Commission, Dr. C. Rangarajan, has called for credible, timely and adequate statistics as the Indian statistical system suffered from serious deficiencies in relation to all these dimensions.

Delivering the keynote address at the golden jubilee function of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) here today, Dr. Rangarajan said credibility or reliability had to be the fundamental attribute of any set of data and credibility rested on three elements - the methodology adopted, the efficiency of the data collection agency and the independence of the statistical authority. In this context, he pointed out that one criticism against the NSSO was that the basic design of the National Sample Survey (NSS) had remained the same since the NSS was started and that it had failed to incorporate into practice much of the methodological developments in statistics that had taken place during the last 40 years.

Dr. Rangarajan quoted experts to point out that powerful techniques existed by which auxiliary information could be exploited to improve the accuracy of estimates obtained from current surveys but the NSSO had not made use of such techniques. He also drew attention to the fact that non-sampling errors associated with large scale surveys far outweighed those of sampling errors and that the NSSO had not paid adequate attention to the newly emerging techniques to tackle non-responses.

Dr. Rangarajan also felt that a statistical authority should be empowered to release data without any interference by political or administrative authorities and that timeliness of data should not result in any compromise with the quality of data.In his address to the function, the Minister of State for Statistics, Mr. Arun Shourie, said the entire reforms process could be derailed if, depending on improper data, people continued to say that poverty had increased because of the reforms.

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Section  : Business
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