‘India does poor job of asking questions in surveys’

Numbers enlighten empower elevate it can help us make sense of modern India anticipate the future But numbers do not exist in a rarefied space The push and pull of political and social forces around the world donrsquot leave numbers unaffectedrdquo writes Chennaibased independent data journalist Rukmini S in her new book Whole Number and Half Truths Westland During the pandemic Rukmini helped make sense of complex COVID19 data with her minipodcast series The Moving Curve In her debut nonfiction she does the same except that the scale is large and the conversations deeperEdited excerpts from the interviewIn the book you highlight that accurate crime statistics most essential for a democracy seem to elude us especially due to underreporting What does this mean for IndiaUnderreporting is just one part of the problem Presently violent crimes and crimes against the body including sexual crimes against women are comparatively more likely to be reported than lowerrung property crimes for example bicycle or mobile theftWe also systematically get sexual crimes wrong I do think that the official statistics misclassify a large share of consensual relationships those between interreligiouscaste couples for instance as sexual crimes The more we give these conservative values legal backing the more we will see these numbers rise in absolute terms and make up a great share of sexual crimes The point is that if you go by the police or NCRBrsquos National Crime Records Bureau statistics alone you may get a very skewed sense of what Indiarsquos crime landscape looks likeWhat we might have to increasingly do with data is to triangulate it with other sources So we should triangulate officially reported crimes against women with those reported during household surveys even if they werenrsquot reported by the police That might help provide a more focussed attention Misunderstanding the landscape of crime would mean misunderstanding the landscape of life in India in generalRukmini SStatistics show that India was placed even lower than Pakistan on the belief that civil rights were an ldquoessential feature of democracyrdquo How crucial is this data to understand the countryrsquos social fabric in the futureI was quite taken aback by these numbers We have allowed a liberal narrative to develop where we believe that there are pockets of conservatism but the majority of the country is liberal and secular Itrsquos of course a narrative that liberals have enjoyed holding dear But there is a very strong streak of authoritarianism that runs through the country which manifests itself as mob violence cheering of encounter deaths etc We have allowed ourselves to believe it is a fringe belief But I donrsquot think thatrsquos actually trueReligion and caste still matter in the countrymdashin a national survey 85 per cent people said that marriage between two people of different religions was not acceptableWhen you see as much opposition to intercaste marriages as you see to interreligious it makes me fear that the very endogamous nature of marriage in India hasnrsquot been dislodged at all There is an added edge of religious hostilities which makes it even more socially acceptable to express onersquos views than before as therersquos enormous state sanction But if you look at the numbers you will see that Muslim disapproval of interreligious marriage is as high as among the Hindus There is a broad resistance to intergroup mixing which again we donrsquot acknowledge enoughI found it interesting to see the study by researcher Payal Hathi in the US While no one in the US would make the argument that racism has disappeared from the data you will see that the social norms have changed ie people donrsquot think itrsquos acceptable to state their beliefs against interracial marriages to surveyors anymore This isnrsquot true of India That in itself is an enormous failure of newIndiarsquos democratic project We should be talking about it moreYou point out in the book how elections are about ideas and the assumption that Indians vote for ldquodevelopmentrdquo or ldquoreligionrdquo would be simplifying the argument Could you explainA part of it is backed by research and data and another part comes from my own sense of covering elections While people may not always speak the language of idealism or ideologies that essentially is what is at play There is an ideology that they see believe in and are voting for I think one of the reasons why this narrative or belief that Indian voters are voting for ldquourban developmentrdquo has taken hold is because we have become very literal in how we interpret surveys In surveys people will be asked what they are voting for Sometimes they will be given an option Of course people will say jobs and unemployment matter Which isnrsquot to say it doesnrsquot But there are other forces that are operational Look at the 2019 General Assembly electionsmdashIndia was encountering historic unemployment at the time and yet again everyone said that they were voting for jobs and growth These two facts obviously didnrsquot align Deeper conversations with voters will tell you about the big ideas that animate their lives You canrsquot see such insights in surveys alone The truth is that we do a very poor job of asking questions in surveys and then do a very literal job of interpreting them In the past India has tried and failed to collect data on ldquoincomerdquo Whatrsquos been the biggest challengeThere are two areas that are part of the problem Agricultural income is notoriously hard to tabulate due to issues of seasonality changes in price structure etc There is also the big issue of how to capture issues at the highest end of the spectrum The rich are hard to survey and to get a real picture of their incomes is complicated Also a majority of Indians have multiple sources of income which is hard to computeThe National Sample Survey NSS has been labelled unreliable once too many Do you think itrsquos still neededYes I think we still need the NSS very much The issue isnrsquot that the NSS has been unreliable The rot in the NSSO National Sample Survey Office reports and its statistical architecture predates this government Some of the issues include not ramping up frequency of surveys continuing to ask an inordinately large set of questions and underinvestment in trained surveyors In the past too there have been attempts made to pushback NSSOrsquos reportsmdashwersquove seen that happen in the UPA era too But what we saw in 2019 hasnrsquot happened in its history before First the government held back the NSSOrsquos unemployment report despite it being ready and published it only after returning to power The same thing happened with its household consumption expenditure surveymdashthough it was leaked the government said that it was not goodenough data and junked it entirely Itrsquos hard to see any other reason except that the survey painted the government in an unflattering light It didnrsquot suit their narrative What has happened with the NSSO today is part neglect and current sidelining