Prime Minister Imran Khan's signature Ehsaas programme launched on 27 March 2019 with his Policy Statement uploaded on the website highlights the need for data integrity though it is unclear if implementation has begun.
In Section One of the Statement titled "addressing the elite capture and making the government system work for equality" the following is noted: "National Strategy for the Development of Statistics, for strengthening equality and availability of statistics and to ensure the independence of statistics from political and other undue external influence, so that the government can have access to accurate, reliable, and timely statistics and a solid credible base of evidence, which is critical to support the design and evaluation of policies." This is followed by a paragraph on: "Data accessibility and transparency policy. Free accessibility of data will be ensured through the district development portal in which poverty and other socioeconomic indicators across Pakistan's districts will be available to policymakers and the public. The portal will allow tracking differences in performance and will be an important accountability tool in the implementation of Ehsaas."
The inclusion of this extremely critical component in the Ehsaas programme that would raise the credibility/claims of the administration must be lauded. In a country like Pakistan few if any finance ministers have resisted the temptation to manipulate data with the express objective of showing their own performance as considerably better than the ground realities suggest. This is particularly so for data that impacts on the quality of life of the general public - inflation and unemployment levels - with obvious political overtones.
The list of alleged data manipulators is exhaustive with nearly all finance ministers for the past two decades making the list. Shaukat Aziz would reportedly change the final figure while neglecting to change its components enabling his detractors to credibly point out the discrepancies and challenge his data integrity. Dr Hafeez Sheikh, an economist by education, manipulated data more cleverly during his first stint as the country's finance minister - through changing the weightage of the components to legitimately come out with a favourable statistic - an example is reducing the weightage of food in the Consumer Price Index leading to an inflation reduction from nearly 24 percent to under 12 percent at one go.
Ishaq Dar, an accountant by training, followed the Shaukat Aziz route (though he is on record as challenging data during the Musharraf years) during his very short term as the finance minister during the Zardari-led government. Additionally, he redefined debt (thereby reducing the debt by 3 trillion rupees) as well as foreign exchange reserves to include foreign currency held by the commercial banks as reserves. Sadly, his ignominious escape from the country has not led the party to abandon his patently flawed policies and PML-N leaders continue to show Dar years' manipulated data (especially with regard to the growth rate) as proof of better performance than at present.
The resurfacing of Dr Hafeez Sheikh as the country's finance minister does raise the possibility of data manipulation in spite of the fact that PBS now comes under the control of the Ministry of Planning, Development and Reforms which was headed by Khusro Bakhtiar (20 August 2018 to 18 November 2019) and is now headed by Asad Umar (19 November 2019 to-date). It is unclear as to how much support if any either of these two men gave to the PBS, support that was required to ensure Prime Minister's vision for data integrity enshrined in his Ehsaas statement. The most recent price data released by the PBS especially with respect to wheat being available at 40 rupee per kg raises serious questions about the integrity of the data.
The focus of the PTI in terms of PBS has been on appeasing the concerns/reservations of their coalition partner MQM about the census 2017. The PBS website reveals that Asad Umar and Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication (resigned since then) were briefed on the census 2017 results on 12 December 2019 - results which were declared highly controversial with respect to Sindh. This was two days after Siddiqui held a press conference in Karachi referring to the 2017 census results for Karachi as not due "to a mistake. Karachi is the largest city of Pakistan and its population and that of urban Sindh parts of Sindh was intentionally shown less than in the census which falls within the ambit of international crime." He further contended that it is beyond anyone's understanding that the census authorities showed zero population in some blocks of Karachi where the number of votes was between 200 and 800. It is unclear whether any decisions were taken during the briefing.
Pakistan People's Party also expressed reservations on the census 2017 results with Senator Taj Haider stating in the last week of May 2018, before the PTI government took over power, that "the fraudulent de jure method employed in census 2017 records migrants in their provinces of origin and does not count illegal residents at all...the exclusion of all migrants and illegal residents in Sindh from its population is going to cost a reduction of an average of 50 billion rupees per year from the federal divisible pool in Sindh's share during the next 10 years;" he also noted that the flawed census results would lead to a marked reduction in Sindh's share of federal jobs. However, the PPP, with an overwhelming majority in Sindh, has not issued any statement about the census results since then - a silence that indicates the party is grappling with other more serious issues with the federal government rather than abandoning its reservations on the census.
To conclude, there has been no public statement by the relevant minister or PBS with respect to open challenges to its recent data, including the market wheat price; in addition there has been no policy statement envisaging greater autonomy to enable it to present accurate data that would strengthen the government's capacity to take informed decisions on time. One can only hope that Asad Umar, publicly accusing administrations of data manipulation when PTI was in opposition, will take appropriate measures, in line with Prime Minister's Ehsaas policy statement, to ensure that at least the current finance minister, with a history of manipulation during his previous stint, is unable to flagrantly violate data integrity.
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