At the end of March, the Solicitor General told the highest Court that three out of 10 migrants carried the coronavirus. The DG of ICMR then said you don’t need a mask. Both couldn’t have been right. My friend Deepak Nayyar has, in an article on April 30 giving sage advice to the PM, given a priority at the margin to livelihood over life, admitting that facts are not available. Not everybody will agree with this.

Statisticians and meteorologists are fall guys. It is their lot to give us facts, but society basically loves dreams, and those who hold the mirror on you are not kosher. If like me, you had pneumonia and just missed the virus, you look forward to facts to save your life and ring the bell in gratitude to those who cured you last month and want them to get support. The mirror of statistics is important.

Pronab Sen was on the TV channels. His message was tragic and his elegant beard didn’t dim his concern. Our Census enumerators and the NSS surveyors had never faced the problem of non-response. This was always a bottleneck in data collection in advanced economies. People there don’t have the time to answer questionnaires. So the design of surveys allows for non-response.

Not so in Bharat. But now problems are coming up, Sen said. We always liked the person who came with a long form. We were hospitable and open to sharing our stories. But Sen says that’s in the past. That faith of years has broken down.

It had been assiduously created. Not just the CSO and the NSS, but even characters like me, as Chairman of BICP (a price fixation agency), collected industrial data from firms by giving an assurance that it will not be divulged. If it was bad enough for a plant to give information to a price fixing agency, it was worse for that information to end up in the hands of competitors. I wanted BICP studies to be available to the world, as I was interested in the transition away from controls to fiscal policies and that needed data-based public debate. We hired younger economists (‘younger’ in those days), to rewrite the reports after ‘hiding’ plant or firm level data.

So Onkar Goswami, Isher Ahluwalia, R Radhakrishna and many others, appointed as consultants, recalculated the statistics so that data was not available in numbers less than three plants or firms. If it was two, one would find out information on the other. The BICP studies were widely quoted in policy debates on reform at home and abroad.

Statisticians need care. If people have a feeling, however remote or even irrational, that the stuff will be used against them, they will not cooperate. Now we are told the enumerators are being chased away.

Those who think they know all, will be happy, without facts. But as the Vice-Chair of the NITI Aayog said in his Lakdawala Memorial Lecture at Ahmedabad, policies have to be based on reliable and complete facts. This is particularly so when you do good welfare schemes like Ayushman Bharat, free grain distribution in lock downs, and so on.

Let’s not mix up data collection with the current objectives of official policy. If the measuring rod is not stable, we would never know if we are doing well or badly. Statistics are very important, my love.

The writer is a former union minister

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