Sonalde Desai warns, “Whether we like it or not, Coronavirus is knocking on the door, and we have two weeks to prepare.”
NCAER - NATIONAL DATA INNOVATION CENTRE
Sonalde Desai warns, “Whether we like it or not, Coronavirus is knocking on the door, and we have two weeks to prepare.”
The National Sample Survey (NSS), the flagship survey providing information on standards of living in India, has recently come under criticism as the Government chose not to release the results of the NSS Consumption Expenditure data from 2017-18 (Jha 2019). Critics argue that this is due to declining consumption between 2011-12 and 2017-18, which the National Statistical Office (NSO) is trying to conceal; the NSO, on the other hand, claims that the data quality for this particular survey is unreliable. One of the challenges facing the interpretation of consumption data over this period pertains to difficulties in disentangling long-term changes from the short-term supply shock caused by demonetisation. The demonetisation, implemented in November 2016, led to a tremendous cash crunch and adversely affected the purchasing power of consumers as well as incomes of small businesses and workers in the informal economy. In this brief, we use information from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to provide an independent assessment of changes in living standards across the country.
Without policy and legislative changes along with the refusal to alter conventional mindsets, India’s female population is unlikely to emerge from the morass of poor economic performance
According to the 2011 census, 7.4 million people in the country were married before the age of 18 years, 88 per cent of whom were girls. UP, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Bihar, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, together amounted to 70 per cent of child marriages in India
The national discourse can ill-afford the danger of being hijacked by the poor quality of data
