The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) is coming up with 7th economic census for 2019. The census, coming after a gap of five years, will focus a national-level data warehouse which will collate all official statistics. It will also cover GDP related data and three surveys regarding services, unincorporated enterprises and time use.
MoSPI is expected to release national-level data warehouse within next six months. Employment and Household Consumer Expenditure related surveys will also also expected to come out in a couple of months, Chief Statistician of India Pravin Srivastava told Indian Express.
Talking about National Data Warehouse he said, “MoSPI is working to collate all the official statistics in a National Data Warehouse. There will be a repository vault where all statistical information like surveys and administrative systems will be collected. This prime project will streamline the availability of data across departments, ministries, sectors and state governments. Everyone will have access to same set of data,” Indian Express quoted Srivastava as saying.
“The field work for NSSO’s five-yearly survey, with 2016-17 as reference period, is going on. The data is being processed, we are looking at how the fieldwork and the data is converging. In another two months we are expecting to release the quarterly results,” the report quoted him as saying.
Srivastava said that the ministry needs to “augment human capital” for all the additional work that they will do apart from the usual work for inflation and national statistics. “This work needs to be done in a very short time span, so, we have an an outsourcing model. We get the field staff outsourced and wwe do the monitor, supervise and train them in house. January onward, we will be doing field work. And we adopting use of technology so that results come out quickly. It’s tough but we are progressing,” he added.
Recently, Committee on Real Sector Statistics released a report which shows that economy grew faster in two terms of the UPA government versus first four years of the NDA rule. On this the ministry said that these numbers were not official estimates.
The national-level data warehouse works as a a central repository of all the statistical data collected various ministries, UTs and state governments. This integrated data allows policy makers and researchers to access data sets, its history and extract it across different groups.
