How do you know if your data is trash? You go and look at the toilets. In 2018, Rajasthan, a state in northwestern India popular with tourists, declared itself “open defecation free.” Separately, government auditors visited dozens of villages in the state to inspect homes built under a government housing subsidy scheme. “Interestingly, 49% of homes do not have toilets,” the report notes. Despite this revelation, data dashboards continued to show a 100% pigeon penetration rate. Really interesting.
It is not uncommon, anywhere in the world, for one wing of government to have no idea what another wing is doing. But this short article is not a trivial mockery of a columnist. This was mentioned in a recent report by the government’s Niti Aayog think tank, which lamented the quality of statistics in India. The danger of inaction, she said, is that “politics depends on numbers that no one fully trusts.” This was just the most serious of the six risks I listed.
For decades after independence, India boasted a much higher statistical infrastructure than its level of development would suggest. But the regime suffered from neglect and political interference. Things hit rock bottom in the 2000s under governments led first by the fragmented and scandal-plagued Congress and then by the ideologically inexperienced Bharatiya Janata Party. Disagreements in 2018 and 2019 — over GDP calculations, unemployment rates, payroll and consumption data — sapped confidence, at home and abroad, in India’s numbers. After one incident, two officials at the National Statistical Commission, a regulatory body, resigned in protest.
Any competent political group should know how to manipulate data to make itself look good, or at least less bad. India’s clumsy approach of withholding polls or using indefensible methodologies has made it look worse than the actual numbers might look. In the end, the government realized that the dodgy data was hurting it more than helping it. In 2024, it appointed Saurabh Garg, a veteran civil servant, as a senior official in the Ministry of Statistics to turn things around.
And among the obsessive crowd who care about these things — policy wonks, researchers, journalists — Garg is spoken of in glowing terms. He has all the right qualifications: a degree from one of India’s elite universities, an MBA from one of India’s top business schools, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in America. He is well-read and avoids ideological debates. He says things like “If reliable data is not available, there will be unreliable data to fill the void.” Print this logo on your t-shirt, and some in India are sure to buy it.
Since taking office, Mr. Garg has created a calendar of data releases, cleared a backlog of surveys, accelerated the pace of data collection and dissemination, and organized dozens of workshops and consultations. “If you had asked me in 2023 whether all these things would happen in the next three years, I would have said it was impossible,” says Pramit Bhattacharya of Data for India, a nonpartisan website.
After cleaning up the mess he inherited, Garg is now focusing on producing production figures for India’s 800 districts, a level below states, to make economic data more detailed. Another big project is preparing the country’s statistical infrastructure for artificial intelligence. This will include the hard work of harmonizing definitions, setting metadata standards, and pushing other departments to release datasets that AI can process at scale. Many of them still display their data as PDF files, or worse, as images.
Yet the praise heaped on him is a sign of a deeper problem with how India is being run. Despite nearly eight decades of independence, a population of 1.45 billion, and an increasingly growing economy, administrative capacity is only a small fraction of what the country needs. The “steel frame” of governance, as the civil service elite is sometimes called, consists of only 5,577 officers. It has grown by less than 1,100 people in the past 15 years, a period in which the population has risen by 250 million and the size of the economy has doubled. In Britain, which has a population 20 times that of India, there are more than 7,500 senior civil servants.
And with such a small group, depth of talent is an issue. Indian bureaucracy can be an ad hoc affair that relies more on individual capabilities than on established process. Garg has already passed the absurdly low official retirement age of 60, having received extensions for the role. He will eventually move on. If it does its job well, India’s statistical system may rise even higher than the individuals who run it.
