For A Picture Of Indians That’s Worthy Of Policy

Context: Two large scale survey (for employment and migrants) by the Labour Ministry should nudge us to ask how useful our data is and how to fix our statistics.

Issue of data gaps affecting policymaking in India: in the recent context of migrants and employment.

• No data available on how many migrant workers died and how many joined exoduses during migrant crisis aftermath of overnight lockdown – as acknowledged by Labour Minister.
• The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) household survey withheld and related controversies, and the survey on unemployment is done too infrequently.

Government response: Labour ministry announced two large-scale surveys.

• First: Survey of 300,000 households to get a picture of our migrant population, from their slice of our urban populace to their conditions of life and sources of livelihood.
• Second: A quarterly one aims to gather job creation data from 150,000 companies.

Way forward: For conducting successful surveys -

• Focus not on the scale but accuracy: Badly in need of reliable numbers on daily-wage earners and job scenario. Focusing on the following questions/aspects -
  • Reproducibility: If a parallel exercise is conducted independently, will it yield the same results?
  • Inclusiveness: Will the sample truly be random, faceless and representative?; and, will everyone in the target group be equally likely to be included in it?
  • Check biasness: Will all questionnaires be neutral enough to keep out biases brought in by the queries themselves?
  • Clarifying definitions: Disguised unemployment, for example, makes a ‘job’ difficult to define.