Generating and gathering data

Authorities at different levels figure occasionally in media reports carrying out exercises that can gladden the citizens at large. That periodic act is rarely reported upon on the front pages of dailies, not even above the fold-line of inner pages. We are talking of the authorities at Zilla Panchayat and also State Administration levels reviewing Karnataka Development Projects, KDP in short. The presiding officers at these review meetings are often disappointed, as reported in dailies, even as the babus, barring exceptions, are caught napping for presenting data and information relating to the development projects that portray regress rather than progress of even major civil works and the much-glorified social welfare programmes. Some among them hog limelight at the review meetings, thanks to their ability to pull-wool-over-the-eyes of the bosses, as it were. The rest take in their strides the uncomplimentary remarks of the top brass for their indifference towards their duties and responsibilities.

Many kings of the erstwhile princely State of Mysore have been credited by chroniclers with statecraft of the highest quality, not to forget the leading lights in society of their times, serving the rulers with unalloyed loyalty. While the Dewans of the State pro-actively marshalled the available talents, the latter fraternity’s contributions to the State’s progress deserve to be written in letters of gold. The contemporary scenario in the State’s Administration doesn’t bring glory to either the top brass or the rest in the hierarchy.

The Union Government’s act of pulling the shutters down on the nation’s Planning Commission, which enjoyed a reign of six-plus decades, and creating a body called National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) as a policy think-tank earned varied reactions in informed circles. The heart and soul of the Planning Commission have been the data of enormous proportions relating to the nation’s economy, expressed in monetary and physical terms, in a well-oiled system in which the counterparts of the Commission in the States and Union Territories contributed routinely. The nation’s economic strength, as envisaged by the now-defunct central body, namely Gross Domestic Product (GDP), shrunk as it were to a single digit number may not mean anything to 99.9 percent in the land’s population.

Drawing the annual budget for the country as a whole and deciding on allocation of funds to various sectors, based on the Central authority gathering data and its counterparts generating data are too complicated for lay people to understand, although the exercises are ostensibly for their well-being. The manner of generating data at the source is a bit delicate to comment upon.