Reprioritisation of public spends on health, decentralisation required: EAC-PM chairman

Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) chairman Bibek Debroy on Monday said the COVID-19 pandemic has flagged the issue of health expenditure and reprioritization of public expenditure is required keeping in view the paucity of resources.

Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) chairman Bibek Debroy on Monday said the COVID-19 pandemic has flagged the issue of health expenditure and reprioritization of public expenditure is required keeping in view the paucity of resources. Debroy also said that one of the lessons from the ongoing crisis is that a lot depends on decentralization of governance as there is heterogeneity of governance in India.

Speaking at the virtual 'Statistics Day' event of the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI), he said, "What COVID-19 has done is to flag the expenditure on health and efficiency of expenditure on health. Given the paucity of resources, a switching of and reprioritization of public expenditure is required not only on health but down to decentralization." Debroy said it is also important to get data as decentralized as possible. The government has been celebrating the Statistics Day on June 29 every year, on the birth anniversary of Prof P C Mahalanobi, to popularise the use of statistics in everyday life and sensitize the public as to how statistics helps in shaping and framing policies. The event was chaired by Union Minister of Statistics and Programme Implementation Rao Inderjit Singh. At the event, former RBI Governor C Rangarajan was conferred with the first 'P C Mahalanobis Award' for lifetime achievement.

Rangarajan in his acceptance speech for the award on webinar urged the government to accord statutory recognition to the National Statistical Commission (NSC). "I hope that there is a satisfactory end to the controversies that have arisen in the recent past on data and statistics," he added.

In 2018, many eminent economists including Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian had expressed concern over the revised economic growth number. Recalibrating data of past years using 2011-12 as the base year instead of 2004-05, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in November 2018 had lowered the country's economic growth rate during the previous Congress-led UPA's regime. The theme of Statistics Day, 2020 was 'Sustainable Development Goals SDG - 3 -- (Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages) and SDG - 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls).