Poverty Data & Data Poverty | Midweek Matters​ | Parakala Prabhakar​ (5)

India’s number of poor has increased by 75 million and the middle class has shrunk by 32 million, in the wake of pandemic, according to Pew Research Centre. This need not be an inevitable consequence of the pandemic. The reason why we let so many fall into the hell of poverty is that the government was in denial. It suppressed and/or massaged data. Indian official data on important parameters like GDP, Inflation and Unemployment are viewed with suspicion. Corporates, investors and bankers are looking elsewhere for credible and dependable data. In this episode We need credible, dependable and clean data to size up our challenges and plan our journey ahead. To banish poverty, we need to banish Data poverty.