Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Council Bibek Debroy on Monday said that the ongoing Covid-19 crisis has flagged the issue of expenditure on health, and given the paucity of resources, a reprioritisation of public expenditure is required not only on health but also for decentralisation.
“What Covid-19 has done is to flag the expenditure on health and efficiency of expenditure on health. Given the paucity of resources, a switching of and reprioritisation of public expenditure is required not only on health but down to decentralisation,” he said at the Statistics Day event of the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI).
Debroy said that the lesson from the ongoing crisis is that a lot depends on decentralised governance as there is heterogeneity of governance in India. “It is also important to get indicators as decentralised as possible,” he said, adding that this flags the issue of quality of data as along with decentralised data, there is also the issue of time lag.
At the same event, Pravin Srivastava, chief statistician and MoSPI secretary said the traditional data collection mechanisms will face challenges and adapt to the situation. “We are launching e-Sigma, a generalised survey solution for more intelligent data capturing using mobile devices and it will be augmented by telephonic and web-based interviews,” he said, and added that the government is negotiating a loan with the World Bank for a project aimed at improving data quality.
Source: indiatimes.com