A ‘shoot the messenger’ suspension

The suspension of K S James, Director of the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), by the central government is yet another case of shooting the messenger and trashing the message, a policy consistently pursued by the government.

James is an internationally known population scientist and IIPS is an institution which prepares the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) and other important reports and surveys. The government has said that James was suspended after investigation of charges related to administration.

This is not very convincing because there is no clarity about the charges and the investigation. It has also been stated that the health ministry, under which the IIPS works, had cleared James of the charges. The action against him is similar to actions that have been taken against persons and institutions whose work created inconvenience to the government.  

Some results of the NFHS-5 relating to the Ujjwala scheme, the incidence of anaemia, on Open-Defecation Free (ODF) status, etc., did not support the government’s claims about them. These surveys are conducted to help the government to formulate or improve policies on the basis of the data collected by them. Instead, the government has penalised and persecuted those who provided inconvenient data.

There are cases of the government refusing to make public data which did not agree with its claims. It withheld the all-India Household Consumer Expenditure Survey conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) during 2017-2018 because of what it called data quality issues. The NSSO’s Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2018, which showed a sharp increase in unemployment, was held back until after the elections in 2019.

The chairman and a member of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigned over the interference of the NITI Aayog in statistical issues. NITI Aayog released the back-series on GDP growth which contradicted an NSC report in 2018. In the last one month, three members of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council have claimed that a lot of data pertaining to social and economic development in the last few years underestimated the Narendra Modi government’s achievements. This amounts to the government questioning its own data. 

The result of all this has been a loss of credibility suffered by India’s data collection system, which was considered robust and internationally accepted for many decades. The government has also failed to conduct the 2021 decadal census, which is the mother of all surveys, and it is not known when it will be held. There are also reports of apprehensions over the conduct of NHFS-6, which should have begun in June 2023, and from which questions on disability, anaemia, etc., have been deleted. The government has a problem with inconvenient data, and James may only be the latest victim of that problem.