Numbers in India’s Periphery: Political Economy of Government Statistics The Political Economy of Government Statistics

"Over the past two centuries, the deep and multifaceted relation between statistics and statecraft has emerged as a defining feature of modern states across the world. Governments increasingly depend upon statistics for planning and evaluation of interventions as well as self-representation. Numbers in India's Periphery examines systematic and deliberate errors in government statistics. Using field interviews, archival sources and secondary data, the book explores the shifting relations between various kinds of statistics and charts their cradle-to-grave political career in Nagaland, a state located in India's landlocked ethnogeographic periphery stretching from Mizoram to Jammu and Kashmir. This book examines the area (1951-2018), population (1951-2011) and National Sample Survey statistics (1973-2014) of Nagaland, treating them as part of a larger family of mutually constitutive statistics embedded in a shared context. It shows that Nagaland's government statistics suffer from sustained and large errors. It argues that statistics are shaped by a combination of factors, including contests over the delimitation of administrative units and electoral constituencies in the context of weak institutions and dominance of the state in the economy. It also engages with the shared experience of other states of India, including Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur, and other countries in Africa and Asia and non-governmental statistics such as church membership data. Numbers in India's Periphery uncovers a mutually constitutive relationship between data, development and democracy deficits and offers an exciting account of how statistics are social artefacts dynamically shaped over their life cycle by political and economic factors. It contributes to the under-researched field of the political economy of statistics in developing countries"--