National Statistical System of India: NSO and Surveys

Every number an aspirant quotes about India, the growth rate, the rate of inflation, the rate of unemployment, the size of the population, comes from one system of offices, laws and surveys. That system is the national statistical system, and the recent official insistence that strong statistics are the foundation of the Viksit Bharat goal for 2047 has brought it back into discussion. For an examination the topic is a set of names to be fixed firmly: which ministry, which office, which survey, which law and which man gave the system its shape.

The offices that produce the numbers

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation is the nodal ministry for statistics in India. It was created in 1999 by bringing together the Department of Statistics and the Department of Programme Implementation, and it has two wings, the statistics wing and the programme implementation wing, besides the National Statistical Commission as an advisory body. The statistics wing is the National Statistical Office, formed in 2019 by merging the Central Statistics Office with the National Sample Survey Office. The National Sample Survey Office had been set up in 1950 at the initiative of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis to carry out large sample surveys, and the Central Statistics Office had been set up in 1951 to coordinate statistical work and to prepare the national accounts. The National Statistical Office now estimates the gross domestic product and the national accounts, compiles the Consumer Price Index and the Index of Industrial Production, and conducts the National Sample Surveys. The National Statistical Commission was constituted in 2005, following the recommendation of the Rangarajan Commission on statistics, as an advisory body to set standards and to coordinate the statistical work of the Union and the States. The legal basis for the collection of official statistics is the Collection of Statistics Act of 2008, which requires an informant to answer and protects the information given from disclosure for any purpose other than statistics.

The father of Indian statistics

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata in 1931, gave statistics the measure known as the Mahalanobis distance, developed the technique of large scale sample surveys and of pilot surveys, and drafted the plan frame of the Second Five Year Plan with its stress on heavy industry. He is called the father of Indian statistics, and the National Statistics Day is observed every year on 29 June, his birth anniversary, while the World Statistics Day is observed on 20 October.

The major surveys and where they come from

Census and sample survey

A census counts every unit in the population and a sample survey studies a part of it and draws conclusions for the whole; the census gives complete coverage but is costly and infrequent, while a sample survey is quicker, cheaper and can ask more questions, at the cost of sampling error. The Census of India is carried out under the Census Act of 1948 by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner in the Ministry of Home Affairs. The first census in India was taken in 1872 under Lord Mayo and was not simultaneous across the country; the first synchronous census was that of 1881 under Lord Ripon, and the decennial series has run from that year. The census of 2011 was the fifteenth in the series and the seventh after independence. The Periodic Labour Force Survey, begun in 2017, replaced the earlier five-yearly employment and unemployment surveys and reports the three measures of activity status that examiners ask about: usual status, current weekly status and current daily status.

Why the system is tested

Official statistics decide the devolution of taxes, the identification of beneficiaries, the fixing of dearness allowance and the inflation target of the monetary policy framework, so questions on who produces which number carry weight in the general awareness sections of banking, civil services and railway papers. The sensible way to revise the topic is to hold one chain in mind: the ministry is Statistics and Programme Implementation, its statistical arm is the National Statistical Office, its advisory body is the National Statistical Commission, its law is the Collection of Statistics Act of 2008, its founder figure is Mahalanobis, and the population count alone belongs to the Ministry of Home Affairs.