Counting Smarter

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India’s national statistical system serves a diverse population of over 1.4 billion.
Institutional scale: some 5,000 full-time staff members at the central level and over 6,000 field investigators and supervisors during major survey operations across the nation’s 28 states and 8 territories.
Saurabh Garg, secretary of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, is leading reforms to harness technology and digital public infrastructure to meet growing demand for real-time, granular data.

Core approach: continued door-to-door surveys supplemented by tablet-based data collection.
Innovations in the field:
- Tablet interfaces with AI chatbots to assist interviewers in real time.
- Direct upload of tablet data to a background portal called e-SIGMA to streamline processing.
- A mobile app, more intuitive website design, more infographics, and unit-level data downloadable for researchers.
- Training videos for researchers, students, policymakers, and stakeholders on accessing unit-level data.

Official statistics remain primary for policymaking due to rigorous scientific methods, comprehensive quality control, and international comparability.
The ministry is exploring incorporation of alternative data sources: e-commerce, scanner, mobile, satellite, and other high-frequency indicators to provide supplementary insights.

Steps to harmonize data across ministries and agencies:
- A registry of all government data sets, with accounting for different levels of importance.
- A national metadata structure shared with all ministries.
- Alignment with international systems of classification and national classification systems to ensure consistency of definitions.
- Use of unique identifiers for organizations and geographic locations; each agency must use its own identifier to allow interoperability.
- Introduction of a method for reconciling discrepancies between administrative data sets.
Focus on making other ministries’ data machine readable so users can collate, combine, and compare data sets.

The United Nations revised the System of National Accounts (SNA) this year (SNA 2025); India is incorporating required changes into a rebased methodology and new guidelines expected to be released over the next couple of years.
Recent improvements:
- Publication of different sectoral accounts annually; example this year includes forest and water accounts.
- Availability of GST [goods and services tax] data (expenditure-side) that was not available at the last rebasing about a decade ago; GST data will provide more granular estimates for rebased GDP.
- Aim: pair a robust production-side data set with an equally robust consumption-side data set to improve overall account accuracy.

Resource characterization:
- Financial: ministry reports “We don’t have a budget constraint. We don’t need much money because our work is human- rather than finance-intensive.” Once IT infrastructure is in place, maintenance and operational costs are manageable.
- Human: three levels of personnel:
- Indian Statistical Service officers at the top, highly qualified and drawn from premier institutions.
- Ground-level supervisors, many trained in statistics or mathematics.
- Enumerators conducting door-to-door surveys, intensively trained.
Capacity building: encouragement for officers to use the government-wide Karmayogi platform for skill building in areas like communication.

Frequency and coverage:
- Until last year: an annual labor force survey with quarterly updates covering only urban India.
- Since January 2025: production of a monthly report for both urban and rural sectors, plus a quarterly report with more sectoral and employment-type detail.
Sample and content improvements:
- The sample size has been nearly doubled, increasing data granularity.
- New questionnaire items on employment status, education, training and skill levels, and details on where respondents graduated or received certification.

Granularity and sample design:
- Need for data at district, subdistrict, and village levels requires increased sample sizes and leads to increasing margin of error.
- Manpower and financing implications arise from higher granularity needs.
Frequency and timeliness:
- Demand for higher-frequency data; reducing time lag between collection and dissemination is a priority and introduces additional complexities.
Data cooperation and privacy:
- Ensuring continued cooperation from people and organizations amid social-media-era privacy concerns while maintaining credibility and verifiability of data.

Safeguards against political influence:
- India adopted the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics in 2016; the ministry adheres to these principles emphasizing professional independence and accountability.
Practices to build trust and scrutiny:
- Regular stakeholder consultations and conferences to align technical work with user needs and expectations.
- Publication of detailed documentation for large-scale sample surveys to allow independent scrutiny and enhance transparency.

F&D Magazine, Counting Smarter, December 2025 — Interview with Saurabh Garg

Counting Smarter
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