Staff crunch may affect quality of national surveys

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) is facing a shortage of investigators for conducting surveys, a response to an RTI filed by Hindustan Times revealed, raising questions about the quality of data being generated from these surveys.

The Field Operations Division of the NSSO, which is responsible for collecting primary data, has around 24% positions vacant for the posts of Junior and Senior Statistical Officers.

Data from NSSO is central to policy making in India as it happens to be an official source of key socio-economic indicators (consumption, employment etc) collected via large-scale sample surveys.

“The ground level staff of NSSO needs to be strengthened but the process is hindered due to time-consuming appointment procedures,” says Amitabh Kundu, former member of National Statistical Commission and now professor at Institute for Human Development.

The situation is a little better than earlier when the shortage was around 30% and above, says Pronab Sen, former chief statistician of India.

Dr Kundu says staff constraints have prevented the NSSO from increasing the sample size, that is, the number of people surveyed.

The higher the number of people surveyed, the lower is the margin of error, and more reliable is the data.

Manpower shortage also limits the office from taking up new surveys, says Dr Sen. “The quality of data, therefore, suffers both on account of insufficient sample sizes as well as relatively untrained field staff,” he added.

Things are worse in the western zone, which includes Maharashtra, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, with 41% positions of Senior Statistical Officer (SSO) and 34% for Junior Statistical Officer (JSO) are lying vacant.

In the southern zone, there is a 41% shortage in JSOs and 30% in SSO.