Sir,
The Government has refused to accept the numbers that showed the falling affordability of the common masses to meet even the essentials. In its denial, the Government has openly gone into politicizing Hunger.
The credibility of the source of the data, the NSSO, remains beyond questioning. These institutions were built up to secure our democracy. The refusal, in one stroke, has posed a challenge to the objectivity and hence independence that the statistical institutions needed to secure our democracy,
The findings of the report of the household Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) in 2017-18 have been denied entry in the public domain on grounds of “data quality issues”. The survey, one in the chain of such initiatives taken up by NSSO to provide data for assessing Living Standard Measurements, has always been accepted by the World Bank and other international agencies, especially to know the rate of affordability, a pointer to rate of consumption, that in turn brings to light the status of employment. The rising rate of unemployment is linked with the rate of impoverishment.
The act of scrapping comes from an inherent fear. It is fear in facing the truth. Hence has emerged a regularity with which the act is repeated every time when faced with genuine findings. It was there when the government had decided to suppress the findings of the periodic labour force survey. In fact the step is also taken whenever the findings stand adverse to whatever the Government wants the common masses to believe. It is more about the public domain than the reality of suffering masses that the Government appears to have concern.
The withholding of the NSSO survey has its own consequential effects. These reports are followed by the states/UTs with the same survey designs, though with their own resources. The pooled samples offer information at the district level. After the scrapping of the present report, the surveys done by the states/UTs also might face the same fate.
Then, despite the scrapping of the survey results, the dip in consumption demand would remain, and along with it the steady slide in investment activity. It is evidenced by a nearly 30 per cent drop in capital expenditure by the Government in the June 2019 quarter alongside a near halving of new project announcements by India Inc.
Krishna Jha
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