The New Nation - Internet Edition

ACCURATE statistics form the basis for planning, be it for the government, the private sector or the individual. Flawed statistics lead to wrong decision making-including vital ones involving expenditure and investment-leading to undesirable outcome. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure the accuracy and reliability of statistics. For example, spendings and devising of strategies for the population control programme will depend on obtaining correct statistics from the field such as the fertility, the rate of acceptance rate of the planned parenthood and contraceptive methods, the availability of services required for family planning. Only if the statistical details about these phenomena are properly established, then policy planners would be in a position to make realistic plans. But the outcome can be otherwise causing serious failures if one has to design the programme based on unreliable statistics.

A company in the private sector wishing to start a new business must be able to rely on its market studies about the demand for the product it wishes to introduce, the position or market shares of competitors in the field, and the like, to be able to successfully launch the product. The entrepreneur not only relies for the information at the pre-launch stage on his own investigation but also from official data and information sources if the same are available. Hence the imperative that data generated should be precise and reflect the real situation. If this does not happen and the investment decision is taken on the basis of inaccurate data, then failure of the business would be quite certain. Whatever the field, the importance of collating dependable information and statistics, cannot be ignored for the sake of optimum economic performance. But statistical accuracy continues to be a fault-ridden exercise in Bangladesh.

The central official body for collecting statistics, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) prepares statistical information for use by the government in different spheres. But the same are then found to be in conflict with data gathered by other government agencies or organisations. This discrepancy painfully shows up the general problem of depending on statistical information and the hazards involved in acting on the strength of such information. Clearly, therefore, the entire statistics preparation procedures at the levels of the government and the private sector, need to be made very efficient. The skills to be improved should encompass not only upgrading of individual competence. This must essentially also include areas such as creating wider and representative samples from where these would be seen as rightly justified for proper data collection. The quality of BBS data is believed to have improved somewhat after years of trials and errors. But there are only a few sectors for which the official data can be taken as accurate. Efforts should be made to ensure the BBS is accurate in its statistics for most of the sectors it covers.