Numbers in India's Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics

This book analyses the quality of statistics such as geographic area, census population and sample survey statistics in a developing country. Using field interviews, archival sources, and secondary data covering the last seven decades, it explores the shifting relations between various kinds of statistics over their lifecycles and charts their cradle-to-grave political career. It uncovers a mutually constitutive relationship between data, development, and democracy and offers an exciting account of how government statistics are social artefacts dynamically shaped by political and economic factors. The book also quantifies the impact of data quality on the statistics of interest to policy makers such as household consumption expenditure and federal transfers. Numbers in India's Periphery makes a major contribution to the growing literature on the political economy of statistics in developing countries through a novel analysis of the shifting determinants of the nature of data in North East India.

Ankush Agrawal is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. His research interests are agricultural economics, economics of education, health economics and demography, and human development.

Vikas Kumar is Assistant Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. His research interests are applied game theory, political economy, law and economics, and the economics of religion.