To act on them again is mistaken folly

The RBI has justifiably criticised our statistical system for the amount of random noise it generates. But either the physician should heal itself or Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion. There is more noise generated by using year-on-year data than by CSO’s incompetent reporting of data. The IIP and GDP data are a mess, and their updating methods leave a lot to be desired. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for bad data to be transformed into badder policy.