The problem with cherry-picking data

Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri said last week, “we definitely have a data crisis,” and blamed academics for creating a “false narrative”. Data are being withheld precisely where experts have flagged problems, such as on employment, farmers’ crisis and economic growth. To counter the argument of a crisis facing large segments of the population, the government first tried to discredit alternative arguments and then changed its stance to say that data on the unorganised sector employment were bad. Most critically, if data on unorganised sector employment are not reliable or are non-existent, then GDP data are also not credible. If the alternative data on unorganised sector growth are included, then the rate of growth would turn out to be less than 1%.