New Delhi: The Union government told the Rajya Sabha on Monday (July 31) that it has no plans to empower the National Statistical Commission (NSC) using a legislation.Minister of state for statistics and programme implementation Rao Inderjit Singh was answering a question on whether the government is planning to empower the NSC by insulating the selection process from political bias.Singh responded that said the chairman and members of the NSC are selected on the basis of the recommendations of a search committee constituted by the government from time to time. “In view of this, at present, there is no such proposal under consideration,” he said, according to the Business Standard.There are also no proposals on providing the NSC with financial autonomy and creating a technically equipped entity with statutory powers to oversee the statistical system, he added.India’s data collection and release mechanisms have come under criticism under the Narendra Modi government, as government has sought to keep several reports under wraps because of unflattering data. The 2021 Census, postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, has still not taken place.In response to another question on the timelines to generate primary data for important studies like consumer expenditure survey and economic census not being adhered to, Singh said the fieldwork for the 7th Economic Census was envisaged to be completed in three months after its launch in July 2019. “However, due to several operational challenges with the implementing agency, collection of primary data could not be completed as envisaged and it was stretched up to March 2021,” he claimed.Recently, the Union government established a new oversight mechanism for official data, replacing the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics (SCES), set up in late 2019, with a Standing Committee on Statistics (SCoS). The SCES was tasked with examining economic indicators pertaining to the industrial sector, the services sector, and the labour force statistics. This meant that their purview was limited to datasets like the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the Annual Survey of Industries, the Index of Industrial Production and the Economic Census.Pronab Sen, India’s first chief statistician and the former Chairman of the National Statistical Commission, has been named the new chair of the committee.
