India’s War on/with Numbers

What do you call a democracy that’s afraid of numbers?

A performance.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has quietly stopped counting. Not people. Not jobs. Not food. Not death. Not hunger. Certainly not truth. Since 2014, this country armed with satellites, biometric surveillance, and digital dreams has managed to misplace its most basic tool of governance: statistics.

A Government of Headlines, Not Data

You may have noticed. Every time the numbers start to get ugly unemployment rises, consumption drops, or fewer children are vaccinated those numbers vanish. Like magic. And if they don’t vanish, they arrive so late they miss the news cycle entirely.

Take the 2021 Census. It’s now 2025. Still missing. We’re running a welfare state based on population data from when TikTok didn’t exist, and Modi was just entering his first term.

Unemployment reached a 45-year high in 2017-18. That’s not a rumour, it was confirmed in the PLFS. But that report was buried until after the 2019 elections. Why? Officially, “data processing.” Realistically, data suppression.

Then there’s the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey: 2017-18. It found that rural consumption had dropped for the first time in over four decades. Guess what? That report was “withdrawn” because it had “quality issues.” Translation: it didn’t tell the right story.


Institutional Independence: Deleted Like an Old Tweet

Two members of the National Statistical Commission; P.C. Mohanan and J.V. Meenakshi, resigned in protest. Not over ideology, but irrelevance. They were ignored, sidelined, treated like decorative houseplants in a ministry that no longer wanted oversight.

Then, as if to underline the point, the government merged the NSSO and CSO into the new National Statistical Office and placed it under the same secretary who answers to the executive. Independence? That’s now a metaphor. The old model was science. The new one is compliance.

And it shows.

GDP=Grossly Distorted Perceptions

In 2015, the government changed how we calculate GDP. Suddenly, India was growing faster. Too fast. Arvind Subramanian, then Chief Economic Adviser, said the growth figures were likely overstated by 2.5 percentage points.

Why? Because they were built on the MCA-21 database, a dubious list of registered companies, a third of which couldn’t even be verified. These are zombie firms. Ghost data. Phantom growth. But they served a purpose: narrative control.

When the past looks too good (higher growth under the UPA), we disown the data. When the present looks bad (rising joblessness), we delay the release. When the future looks uncertain, we replace statistics with slogans.

Bureaucracy as a Theatre of Obedience

What does one do in a system where bureaucrats are promoted for loyalty rather than competence? You get silence, evasion, and the slow death of accountability. Ministries stop publishing annual reports. Portals vanish or display ancient data. PDFs replace spreadsheets. Metadata disappears. Archiving becomes impossible.

India’s statistical system used to be among the best in the Global South. Now it resembles a set piece in a dystopian drama: high-tech visuals, no usable content.

Who Pays?

Everyone.

Researchers. Journalists. Economists. Policy makers. Farmers. Teachers. Workers. Women. Children. Anyone who relies on the truth to make decisions, demand rights, or even understand where this country is headed.

With no Census, food security allocations are off by tens of millions. Without current data, health infrastructure collapses under pandemics we can’t predict. Labour policy ignores the gig economy because the numbers don’t exist. Women farmers remain invisible, because land data doesn’t ask their names.


A Strategy of Ignorance

This isn’t incompetence. It’s intent.

When the PMO monitors global indices and lobbies to tweak methodology so India looks better on paper, that’s not reform. It’s propaganda.

When a survey shows child immunisation collapsing during COVID, and that data quietly disappears from the public portal, it’s not an accident. It’s censorship.

When journalists and civil society researchers use the Wayback Machine to find old reports, and the Wayback Machine itself gets blocked, we’re not in a democracy anymore. We’re in a digital autocracy just with better hashtags.

What Can Be Done?

Let’s not pretend this is just a data story. It’s a democracy story. Because without data, democracy is ornamental. Accountability needs evidence. Governance needs numbers. Policy needs truth. And truth doesn’t survive in silence.

So what must change?

  • Statutory independence for the NSC.
  • Restoration of autonomy to statistical bodies.
  • Release of all anonymised datasets in machine-readable formats.
  • Real transparency in methodology.
  • Public accountability for data delays.
  • A return to ethics in public statistics.

India doesn’t lack capacity. It lacks the courage to be honest.

One Last Question

If a government stops counting poverty, does that mean poverty stops existing?

No. It just means we stop seeing it.

And perhaps that’s the point.

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