Callous disregard of data
Data, they say, is the new oil. The finance minister had poured scorn on the new maxim in her Budget speech saying it is just a cliche though she did acknowledge the significance of credible data to base decision-making on. The real import of the importance of data in modern administration may have dawned on the government when it confessed in Parliament that it had no data on the deaths of guest workers who were forced by the suddenness of the declaration of the world’s most severe lockdown to collectively log millions of miles as they trudged home in distress. This human tragedy, so gut-wrenchingly portrayed when a child was photographed trying to wake its dead mother on a road in Bihar, surpassed even the horrors of the pandemic.
In the absence of credible data gathering, the figure of a crore migrant workers having walked or ferried home by special trains and buses can only be taken as a ballpark figure conjured to satisfy questions tabled in Parliament. If it did not collate any data from different states on the fatalities and the number of returning migrants, the government is guilty of carelessness. But if the real reason is that data is being withheld because of the embarrassment it would cause, the government stands condemned by its own callousness. The suspicion is data — media sources put guest workers’ deaths near about 300 — is a tool to be manipulated in the hands of the current dispensation as amply proved in several debates over statistics regarding job losses in a downward spiral of the economy in the last couple of years.
The government also admitted in Parliament that it had no data on farmer suicides in the last three years. The fact that its own national crime database reveals 10,281 farmer suicides in 2019 and 10,357 in 2018, besides counting 42,480 deaths by suicide of farmers and daily wage workers last year, shows up the rulers as shying away from the truth when it comes to keeping people’s representatives informed in Parliament. In refusing to address inconvenient data, the government is proving unworthy of the people it governs.