AT PENPOINT
A recent meeting chaired by Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb was told something that everybody claimed, and which had done so much to damage the credibility of the government: that it didn’t have reliable figures.
Aurangzeb saw this as something that hampered him in the execution of his functions, and well he might, for as a banker of great experience, he must have relied on figures and statistics to get his work done. To be Finance Minister, to be asked to manage a Third-World economy, to achieve political results, and not merely not have figures to guide him, but incorrect ones, must be galling. However, apart from its applicability to him, to his ministry, to his entire government, its application to the country and its people is devastating.
It means that the nay-sayers are right. The government does lie. Not necessarily because it wants to, but because its figures are unreliable. It cannot admit that it does not know, so it relies on whatever it has. It as figures are not falsified. They are just outdated.
That provides a temptation to which government statisticians probably fall victim. They extrapolate. The possibility of manipulating old data is what gives the government a bad name. It should be realized that it is not merely obtaining the data which is the issue/ The next stage is determining whether this is good or bad. For example, if it is found that Balochistan and Punjab have the same number of hospitals, does that mean the two provinces are equally well-served? Only if they had the same populations would this be true. So that means you need to count the people. As a matter of fact, there is a National Census Organization embedded within the Bureau of Statistics, which is part of the Planning Ministry.
Once you have counted the people, you can determine all sorts of things/ For example, are there roads between where people live? If you built a road between Points A and B, how many people would get access (and remember, people living in village C and D would also gain access). It is the census result which makes planners make the road swing through to pass by villages C and D, but not by village E, because it is too far to virtually double the road length to take it in. Well, you can, from a purely engineering perspective, but the Finance Department will never release the funds, nor the Planning Department approve the project. Well, unless the local MPA or MNA gets the CM to give him a directive for the road.
Of course, one of the problems that have to be faced is political interference. That usually makes nonsense of any figures-based criteria. It is said that a Martial Law Administrator once directed that his village be connected to the main highway. Bureaucrats patiently explained to him that the village was low on the figures-based priority list, and was not due a road. The MLA roared that the village had produced one provincial ruler in 5000 years, and would not produce another for 5000 years. If the road was not built now, it never would. The village got its road.
While that was a martial-law governor, it should not be assumed that elected leaders are any better. In fact, they are much worse. The problem is that there is too much anecdotal evidence flying around, which are figures of sort. But you don’t run any state that way. (In fact, that is one explanation of the origin of writing: one couldn’t remember the details of tax collection, so it was recorded, very crudely, true, but still recorded. Thus writing had to be invented, for economic reasons.)
However, the government will have to go that extra mile to convince the public that its figures are correct, and that its data is secure. A politician once said, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” The government must disprove this, or else no one will believe it has done anything.
The recent meeting saw holes in the specific areas of unemployment, GDP growth, per capita income, poverty and labour migration. The particular problem seems to have been either the failure to conduct a recent survey, or if conducted, results not to be available. For example, GDP growth was calculated on the basis of livestock constituting a third of agricultural production. There had been an agricultural census, but the results were still being tabulated. Present figures for livestock were based on the offtake of fodder. Because the GDP figure was doubtful, the per capita income figure was also doubtful.
Similarly, the poverty number could not be reliably pitched, because the Household Integrated Economic Survey was last conducted in 2018-2019. The current poverty figure, of 21.3 percent, was based on this. The 2024-2025 Survey had been completed, and was being tabulated, with results to be ready in December. The Punjab Labour Force Survey has also been conducted, with results to come in December. Meanwhile, planners can use five-year-old data.
The Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey is supposed to be the basis of planning about education, healthcare, housing, water and sanitation, information technology, food insecurity, disability and migration. Only there are only old figures. The Survey is planned for next year, and as usual the results will be available only later in the year.
The collection of data has traditionally been done by the patwaris. In urban areas, surveys must be conducted. The latter cost money. For the census, the Army has been used, as well as a vast array of government servants. However, for other surveys, governments often have a lower priority. The survey mechanisms go back to the Raj, when first statistics were compiled so that they could inform economic decisions. In fact, the British introduced the concept of collecting statistics. It is not that their predecessors did without, but the elaborate structure of surveys and analysis represented by the PBS was developed by the British at the same time that economics was developing as a discipline dependent on statistics.
Though the collection of data is a major task (with the development of survey questions an art in itself), interpretation is also major. For policymakers, its is more important. There is a positive correlation in New Zealand between the sales of make-up and the divorce rate. But is it relevant to either make-up sales or the divorce rate. Now there is a positive correlation in Pakistan between fertilizer sales and wheat production. But there is no point in pushing fertilizer use if no wheat is being grown. That is where the patwari comes in. He has already recorded how much acreage is under wheat cultivation, so getting the information from him is not an issue.
As far as computing went, the government’s statisticians were leaders, and if not at the cutting edge, were far ahead of the rest of the government. Now it is to be seen how they adapt to the age of Artificial Intelligence.
It should be useful, but there are worrying signs that it may well lie, even manufacturing evidence to back its contentions. It seems that, as it is learning from a vast database, the lies in that database are teaching AI to lie. It also has no ethical core which would stop it from lying. Adopting AI would bring many advantages, as well as using cloud storage. The former was developed precisely to handle large amounts of data; the latter so that there could be large amounts available to handle.
However, the government will have to go that extra mile to convince the public that its figures are correct, and that its data is secure. A politician once said, “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” The government must disprove this, or else no one will believe it has done anything.
