Highlighting that inadequate and unreliable data crucially affected policy making, former Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian on Wednesday said that the brutal way in which the second wave of COVID-19 affected the country was partly due to the under-reporting of deaths during the first wave.
During a virtual panel discussion on the recently launched book ‘Whole numbers and half truths,’ authored by journalist S. Rukmini, he said the complacency the country showed in early 2021 before the second wave was, in a way, fed by the lack of data on excess deaths.
Recalling the discussions around growth and policy interventions during his tenure as the CEA, he said his concerns over the economy and the need for expansionary fiscal and monetary policies did not find traction within the government as the official numbers showed that the country’s economy was growing around 7%.
He said the openness needed while approaching and understanding science, data, research and statistics was becoming more difficult and challenging in the modern era due to the social media, echo chambers and the rise of identity politics all over the world. “There is a sense that the citizens for whatever reasons have already made up their mind,” he said.
As an example, he said that if he were to say that the gross domestic product was mismeasured, and if the people had already made up their mind that he belonged to a particular camp, then the battle was already lost.
Ms. Rukmini said one of the ways for journalists to improve trust was to publish the raw data that they used for their articles on public domains for interested people to check and arrive at their own understanding. Stressing on the importance of explaining the data to the public, she, however, said publishing raw data alone should not be seen as a shorthand to transparency.
Cherry picking of data was a problem on all sides of the political spectrum. There was a need for journalists to be cautious against cherry picking data, she said. While acknowledging that there were several issues with government data, she said that hard evidence on large scale manipulation or fudging of data had not been found yet.
A.S. Panneerselvan, former Readers’ Editor of The Hindu and fellow of Roja Muthiah Research Library, who moderated the discussion, said a major problem with journalism was that media organisations had stopped investing in in-house domain expertise. The problem was only partially due to the financial stress the media organisations were facing.
Elaborating on the twin roles of journalism that included ‘bearing witness’ and ‘making sense,’ he said while bearing witness was to happen through reporting, making sense was supposed to happen via the opinion pages. There was a worrying trend of views trumping news as the idea of bearing witness, which involved reporting, cost money.
