How do you know if your data are crap? You go and look at the toilets. In 2018 Rajasthan, a state in north-western India beloved by tourists, declared that it was "open defecation free". Separately, government auditors visited dozens of villages in the state to inspect homes built under a government housing-subsidy scheme. "Interestingly", the report notes, 49% of houses had no toilets. Despite the disclosure, data dashboards continued to show potty penetration at 100%. Interesting indeed.

如何判断你的数据是垃圾数据？ 去厕所看看便知。 2018年，印度西北部备受游客青睐的拉贾斯坦邦宣布该邦已实现“无露天排便”。 与此同时，政府审计人员走访了该邦数十个村庄，检查在政府住房补贴计划下建造的房屋情况。 报告“饶有趣味地”指出，49%的房屋没有厕所。 尽管有这一披露，数据仪表盘仍显示厕所普及率为100%。 确实耐人寻味。

It is not uncommon, anywhere in the world, for one wing of government to have no idea what another is doing. But that vignette is not petty snark from a columnist. It is contained in a recent report from Niti Aayog, the government's own think-tank, that laments the quality of statistics in India. The risk of inaction, it said, is that "policy rides on numbers no one fully trusts." That was just the starkest of six risks it listed.

在世界各地，政府的一个部门对另一个部门在做什么一无所知的情况并不罕见。 但上述片段并非专栏作家的尖酸刻薄之语。 而是出自印度政府智库——国家转型委员会近期发布的一份报告，该报告对印度统计数据的质量表示哀叹。 报告称，不作为的风险在于“政策建立在无人完全信任的数据之上”。而这只是报告列出的六大风险中最突出的一个。

For decades after independence India boasted a statistical infrastructure far superior to what its level of development would suggest. But the system suffered from both neglect and political interference. Things reached a nadir in the 2010s under governments led first by a distracted and scandal-plagued Congress party and then by an inexperienced and ideological Bharatiya Janata Party. Controversies in 2018 and 2019—over GDP calculations, unemployment rates, payroll data and consumption—sapped confidence, at home and abroad, in India's numbers. After one incident, two officials at the National Statistical Commission, a regulator, resigned in protest.

独立后的几十年里，印度的统计基础设施远超其发展水平所应具备的。 但该体系既遭受忽视，又受到政治干预。 在2010年代，先是受困于分心且丑闻缠身的国大党政府，后又受制于经验不足且意识形态化的印度人民党政府，情况跌至谷底。 2018年和2019年，围绕国内生产总值（GDP）计算、失业率、工资单数据和消费等方面的争议，削弱了国内外对印度数据的信心。 其中一次事件发生后，国家统计委员会（一个监管机构）的两名官员辞职以示抗议。

Any competent political outfit should know how to spin data to make itself look good, or at least make itself look less bad. India's ham-fisted approach of withholding surveys or using indefensible methodologies made it look worse than the actual numbers would have. Eventually the government realised that dodgy data were harming it more than helping it. In 2024 it installed Saurabh Garg, a veteran of the civil service, as the top official at the statistics ministry to turn things around.

任何有能力的政治团体都应知道如何利用数据来美化自身形象，或至少让自己看起来不那么糟糕。 但印度采取的拙劣手段——隐瞒调查结果或使用站不住脚的方法，反而让自己比实际数据看起来更糟。 最终，政府意识到，不可靠的数据对自身的危害大于助益。 2024年，政府任命资深公务员索拉布·加格为统计部部长，以扭转局面。

Among the terminally nerdy crowd that pays attention to these things—policy wonks, researchers, journalists—Mr Garg is spoken of in glowing terms. He has all the right credentials: a degree from one of India's elite universities, an MBA from its most prestigious business school and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in America. He is well-read and avoids ideological debates. He says things like "if credible data is not available there will be non-credible data to fill the vacuum." Print that slogan on a T-shirt and, you can be sure, some in India would buy it.

在关注这些事情的群体中——政策专家、研究人员、记者——人们对加格赞誉有加。 他拥有所有合适的资历：毕业于印度一所精英大学，拥有该国最负盛名的商学院工商管理硕士学位，还在美国约翰斯·霍普金斯大学获得博士学位。 他博览群书，避免参与意识形态争论。 他说过这样的话：“如果没有可靠的数据，就会有不可靠的数据来填补空白。”把这句话印在T恤上，可以肯定，在印度会有人购买。

Since Mr Garg took over he has created a calendar of data releases, cleared the backlog of pending surveys, sped up the pace of data-gathering and publication, and organised dozens of workshops and consultations. "If you had asked me in 2023 if all these things will happen in the next three years, I would have said it is impossible," says Pramit Bhattacharya of Data for India, a non-partisan website.

自加格上任以来，他制定了数据发布日程表，清理了积压的待调查项目，加快了数据收集和发布的速度，并组织了数十场研讨会和咨询会。 “如果你在2023年问我，所有这些事情是否会在未来三年内发生，我会说这是不可能的。”非党派网站“印度数据”的普拉米特·巴塔查里亚说道。

Having cleaned up the mess he inherited, Mr Garg is now focused on producing output numbers for India's 800-odd districts, a level down from states, to make economic data more granular. Another big project is to prepare the country's statistical infrastructure for AI. That will involve the fiddly work of harmonising definitions, setting metadata standards and pushing other departments to release datasets that AI can process at scale. Too many still put out their data as PDFs or, worse, as images.

在清理完继承的烂摊子后，加格现在正专注于为印度800多个地区（比各邦低一级）生成产出数据，以使经济数据更加细化。 另一个重大项目是为该国的统计基础设施做好人工智能（AI）准备。 这将涉及繁琐的工作，包括统一定义、制定元数据标准，以及推动其他部门发布可由人工智能大规模处理的数据集。 太多部门仍以PDF格式发布数据，甚至更糟的是，以图片形式发布。

Yet the praise being heaped upon him is a sign of a deeper problem with how India is run. Despite nearly eight decades of independence, a population of 1.45bn people and an economy that is growing ever more sophisticated, administrative capacity is a fraction of what the country needs. The "steel frame" of governance, as the elite civil service is sometimes known, is made up of just 5,577 officers. It has grown by less than 1,100 in the past 15 years, a period in which the population surged by 250m and the economy doubled in size. Britain, whose population is a twentieth of India's, has over 7,500 senior civil servants.

然而，人们对他的赞誉也暴露出印度治理方式的更深层次问题。 尽管印度已独立近八十年，拥有14.5亿人口，经济也日益复杂，但其行政能力却远低于国家所需。 精英公务员制度有时被称为治理的“钢铁框架”，但目前仅由5577名官员组成。 在过去15年里，这一数字增长了不到1100人，而同期印度人口激增了2.5亿，经济规模翻了一番。 英国的人口是印度的二十分之一，但其高级公务员数量却超过7500人。

With such a small pool, depth of talent is a problem. And Indian bureaucracy can be an ad-hoc affair that relies more on individual capability than established process. Mr Garg is already past the absurdly low official retirement age of 60, having received extensions for this role. He will eventually move on. If he has done his job well, India's statistical system may even rise above the individuals who run it.

由于人才库规模如此之小，人才深度成为问题。 而且，印度官僚体系可能是一种临时性的事务，更多地依赖个人能力而非既定流程。 加格已经超过了荒谬的官方退休年龄60岁，因担任这一职务而获得延期。 他最终会卸任。 如果他工作出色，印度的统计体系甚至可能超越管理它的个人。

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