Shaktikanta Das, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, said on Friday that data-intensive policymaking and monitoring procedures depend heavily on evidence and analysis as key inputs.
“A prerequisite of such (data) analysis is the availability of timely and credible data with the three Cs of data quality — completeness, correctness, and consistency,” Das said at the 17th Statistics Day Conference at RBI headquarters. Since 2007, the federal government has observed June 29, his birthday, as “Statistics Day” in honour of the distinguished contributions made by the late Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis to the fields of statistics and economic planning.
Das said that the National Statistics Day celebration offers a chance to educate the general public, particularly the younger brains, about the field of statistics.
The head of the central bank emphasised that statistical techniques are used by RBI for its primary tasks.
“The Reserve Bank pursues standardisation across domains to generate consistent, comparable, and harmonised statistics,” according to the most recent worldwide recommendations and best practises.
“We treat data as a ‘public good’ and are disseminating increasingly more data in the public domain for use by analysts, researchers, and the general public,” he said, adding that RBI prefers to satisfy broad dissemination goals over specific criteria.
Regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, he claimed that the RBI’s reporting system ensured business continuity, the flow of verified information was seamless, the “work from home” (WFH) environment was actively supported, and the public dissemination of information continued unabated during the lockdown period.