Source: PRS India and Economic Times
Composition of the committee
- The Committee will comprise 28 members, including representatives from the United Nations, Reserve Bank of India, Ministry of Finance, NITI Aayog, and economists and statisticians.
- It will be chaired by India’s first chief Statistician Pronab Sen
Key highlights
- The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has constituted a Standing Committee on Economic Statistics to review the framework of economic indicators related to the industrial sector, the services sector, and labour force statistics.
- The committee will also deliberate and develop methodologies for surveys on industry, services and employment in place of multiple panels on these issues.
- The committee has been set up at a time when the credibility and independence of India’s official statistics have been doubted on various grounds, including the gross domestic product (GDP) growth numbers and methodology, employment and expenditure surveys.
- The committee will seek to bring consistency among various government economic indices.
- The new committee has been tasked with looking into data sets such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the Annual Survey of Industries, the Annual Survey of Services Sector Enterprises, the Annual Survey of Unorganized Sector Enterprises, Time Use Survey, Index of Service Production, Index of Industrial Production, Economic Census and other surveys or statistics brought before it.
