Relevance : GS Paper III
Context
Last week, demographers from around the world gathered in Delhi to mark 25 years of National Family Health Surveys (NFHS).
Can India’s existing data infrastructure support high quality data collection?
- Indian statistical infrastructure is crumbling and is not able to fulfil even its traditional tasks, let alone meet the new demands.
- If we are to move towards developing a more robust data infrastructure, subscribing to the following core principles may be a good start.
- First, set realistic goals and use creative strategies. For example, obtaining local government data.
- Second, adapt to changing institutional and technological environment for data collection. For example, concurrent monitoring using technologically-enabled procedures.
- Third, establish research units exclusively focused on data collection and research design.
Conclusion
Unless we pay systematic attention to the data infrastructure, we are likely to have the national discourse hijacked by poor quality data as has happened in the past with a measurement of poverty or inconsistent data on GDP.
