The Significance Of The ‘There Is No Data’ Answer

Context: The Government’s consistent ‘no data’ declarations on important issues are a critical part of a larger political project.

Information gap in governance – Government’s consistent ‘no data’ declarations

• Data void amidst pandemic:
  • Migrant crisis and job losses in 2020: World Bank report concluded that 40 million migrant jobs were impacted/lost in India in April 2020. But the Government has said that it has no data.
  • When asked in September 2020 how many frontline health workers had lost their lives during the pandemic, the Government had no data.
  • Government had no information on lack of oxygen claiming lives in the second wave of COVID-19.
• Withholding All-India Household Consumer Expenditure Survey: Conducted by National Statistical Office during 2017-2018.
  • Government cited ‘data quality issues, but there are political overtones as they were published before the 2019 parliamentary elections.
  • The leaked data had suggested a noteworthy slump in consumption expenditure for the first time since data collection had started in 1972-73.
• Data denial on critical policy questions such as The number of deaths caused by manual scavenging, the number of farmers dead during the farmers’ agitation and economic loss caused due to Internet shutdowns.

Reasons behind ‘Denial of Data’

• Hiding incompetence: By avoiding scrutiny and thus, not being accountable for the mess and deterioration in the state of affairs
• Political interests: High personalisation of governance gives little scope for accepting criticism.
• Deflecting accountability to State/past governments: The fall in the share of taxes due to States has never been so low in five years as it is now. Yet there are attempts to paint States in a bad light,
• Arguing that “health is a state subject” for all healthcare mismanagement in recent times.
• No data on deaths due to ‘no oxygen’ because States did not give the data.
• It allows regimes to rewrite the story of the times: The no data stance helps the Government in retaining the power to script the present at a future date. The truth does not matter; the narrative does.
• Restating emergent power equations between the Government and citizens: Asymmetry of power can only be sustained by keeping citizens in the dark while increasing rulers’ reach to know everything.
• Government is building the largest ever technology-driven structure for identification under Aadhaar, which wants biometrics before poor people even get their food grain rations.

Conclusion: Denial of data is not a bug but a feature of the political ideology governing the country.