Articles by S L Shetty

India's offi cial statistical collection machinery has been in decline for more than two decades. The National Statistical Commission was supposed to reverse the decline, but the NSC has had to suffer the government's indifference. It is time the users of information, the academic community in particular, wake up to the fall in quality of Indian data. As a fi rst step, academics and public intellectuals should come together to form an India Database Forum which could discuss and highlight what ails the statistical system and then pressure the government to fi x what was once the envy of the world but is now among the weakest.

Policymakers must see that there is an inconsistency between the new emphasis on inclusive growth and the rigid fiscal strategy they want to follow. Fiscal prudence should not be discarded but the conentional focus on a narrow interpretation of fiscal and revenue deficits harms the cause of balanced growth. There is also a need to reorient government expenditure and to mobilise resources by ending and even rolling back the increasing regressivity in direct taxation. We need, in other words, a new fiscal strategy for the medium term.

The Central Statistical Organisation's revision of the National Accounts Statistics series, by shifting the base year from 1993-94 to 1999-2000 is a welcome step. What is missing in this so-called comprehensive revision is any reference to the serious decline in the quality and reliability of the statistics that form the building blocks for the NAS, as revealed by the National Statistical Commission. There have been attempts though to improve the existing database sources and all changes, except for two, namely, the introduction of a new category of "valuables" in the estimation of gross capital formation and the alignment of industry-wise estimate of GCF with estimation by asset or institution, are to be welcomed.

The CSO's latest estimates of savings and investment in 2003-04 suggest that India no longer faces a constraint on domestic savings. However, there is a need to be careful before coming to such conclusions. A close examination of the estimates suggests that they project an exaggerated scenario of high domestic savings and investment. The numbers are the result of a faulty system of estimation which was to be discarded long ago. The estimates for 2003-04 thus reopen the many misgivings estimation procedures have raised in the past.

This study attempts to compare economic performance across states over the period 1980-81 to 2000-01 using state domestic product (SDP), per capita SDP and sectoral composition of SDP as measures of interstate disparities for the period 1980-81 to 2000-01.