20 October 2011 is World Statistics Day
and I am tempted to comment and to provoke the industry with which I
have been associated for over forty years — as a printer, publicist
and publisher. These days I am not as isolated as I once was. I am
not the only person decrying the lack of social conscience or a
practical sense of community in the Indian printing industry.
In our research company IppStar, I
often comment on the unreliability of government data, even GDP
statistics and the RBI data, but I do not speak too loudly since my
area is the print industry where I am more sure of the numbers which
are based on a huge amount of face to face interviews of expert
informants, as well as a healthily sceptical analysis of secondary
data. I must admit that the general scepticism comes from our
detailed work in the printing, packaging and publishing domain. The
particular seems to give insight to the general and so we largely
ignore the almost daily announcements of GDP projections and
industrial data ups and downs.
On 17 October 2011, a young colleague
who is an avid reader of the Economic Times brought me a clipping
from the morning’s paper of an article by Mythili Bhusnurmath
titled Economic Policy: Shooting in the Dark. She writes, “What was
India's gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate during the first
quarter of the year? Is industrial production rising or falling? What
about services? What is the inflation rate? Is it rising or falling?
The list can go on and on. For, the truth, unpalatable as it might
be, is we really don’t know. “As a result, economic policy
formulation has become more like a game of shooting in the dark.
Policy authorities don't know which way to turn in a scenario where
the three pillars of a sound statistical database — credibility,
timeliness and adequacy — are absent.”
Bhusnurmath goes on to point out that
even monetary policy decisions on serious issues such as inflation
are being made on the basis of very poor data since there is very
little real investment in the actual ground research. She writes,
“Garbage in, garbage out! The RBI, in fact, has paid a heavy price
for its reliance on dodgy data. As RBI governor D Subbarao pointed
out in a recent speech, ‘Policy is framed real time and if the
provisional data that these are based on are inaccurate, the
resultant policies can turn out to be suboptimal choices.’”
So the printing industry is not alone
in its ignorance of real data or its lack of investment in data
collection, compilation and research. Nevertheless, to me it seems a
miracle that bank loans for print projects upwards of Rs. 40 crore
are approved mainly on the basis of relationships and trust since the
data available is really quite sketchy. Of course our multi-client
industry research has subscribers but in our current project every
subscriber is a multinational company. Not a single Indian company or
organisation is supporting a massive effort that could actually make
their projects and growth viable.
What I have written may sound like a
plug for IppStar’s research and why not? While a few leading
printers actually support IppStar in its work, many more call us up
for a few hints about the industry data. And many more ‘borrow’
it without acknowledgement (even for a Red Herring prospectus for an
IPO) and sometimes even print our research articles in their
association magazines without even a phone call or an email!
Like shooting in the dark, borrowing is
our thing. I receive calls from Indian students every month who are
doing a thesis in some foreign university. Investing in data and
research doesn’t really seem to be our thing whether it is the
government or industry or the individual. Actually our industry is
vibrant and could easily play a leading role by investing in real
on-the-ground statistical work. Perhaps this is something that the
so-called leaders of the print industry can think about on World
Statistics Day.
Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in
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