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Study on Agricultural Diagnostics for the State of Bihar in India

Fully 70 percent of its Bihar’s rural work force is employed in agriculture, which contributes over a quarter of the state GDP. Hence, rapid agricultural development remains important for Bihar. Recognizing this, the State government started implementing what it called Agricultural Road Maps in 2008, and is currently on its third Road Map (2012-13 to 2016-17), all aimed at increasing productivity growth in the crop and livestock sectors and boosting farm incomes.

Agricultural growth responded well to these new initiatives in their first four years, reaching 3.1 percent per annum during the first Road Map, but declined to 1.3 percent in the second Road Map, averaged about 2.0 percent during 2001 to 2017, and has shown a decelerating trend since 2012- 13.

What explains these trends in Bihar’s agriculture development? To answer these and related questions, NCAER has partnered with DFID, the UK Department for International Development in India, to do an agricultural sector diagnostic study for the state to understand the economic, natural, technological, and political constraints that Bihar agriculture faces, and what it should do to alleviate these constraints. The key goal of this work has been to identify the binding constraints to faster and more sustainable agricultural growth in Bihar. The search for such binding constraints has covered both the crop and livestock sectors, and has looked at land switching from low-value to higher value crops, crop diversification, crop yield improvements, and input intensification.

The US-China Trade War Impact on India and its Policy Choices

The five-year period 2012-13 to 2016-17 witnessed a decline in Indian merchandise exports at an average rate of 4.5 percent per annum. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry initiated a discussion in August 2018 on designing a strategy for doubling India’s exports by 2025. This growth from US$ 504 billion exports of goods and services in 2017-18 to above US$ 1,000 billion in 2025-26 would imply an underlying growth rate of exports of above 9 percent per annum. While merchandise exports constitute close to 63 percent of total exports, the share of service exports has been 37 percent during the last three years, 2015-16 to 2017-18. Assuming these proportions remain unchanged, a doubling of merchandise exports in six years would mean going from the base 2017-18 level of US$ 309 billion to about US$ 618 billion by 2025-26, and service exports going from US$ 195 billion to US$ 390 billion. These are challenging targets. They raise the question of whether there are unexplored strategic opportunities in the current global trade situation, including in the looming US-China trade war, which can help India either achieve these targets or at least ensure that there are no significant reversals on the path to achieving them. This NCAER paper reflects on how India should react to the trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

The NCAER 2019-20 Mid-Year Review of the India Economy

NCAER’s Mid-Year Review of the Indian Economy (MYR) presents the most comprehensive, independent assessment of the Indian economy. The 2019-20 Review has been published in a longstanding partnership with the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi.

NCAER is grateful to Rudrani Bhattacharya at NIPFP for collaborating with us on the crucial forecasting and nowcasting exercises:

We need a timebound mechanism to transition to a clearer land titling system

We need a timebound mechanism to transition to a clearer land titling system

The Indian macroeconomic slowdown is perceived as being structural in nature. One of the key suggestions being made is that India needs to carry out factor market reforms including those of land markets. In this article we make a specific policy recommendation about land titling reforms. This lies at the heart of the quagmire that has stalled the progress of land reforms in India.

The Indian land titling system is currently based on presumptive titles. It is well-recognised now that we need to move towards conclusive titles. Conclusive titling works on three underlying principles of Torrens land title registration system — mirror curtain and insurance. In short the map/survey should mirror the true picture of the land including its ownership extent and value; the land record should automatically mutate after registration to curtain the past and depict the correct title holder’s name thereby obviating any requirement of producing complicated documents to prove ownership; and lastly the title holder would be insured against any loss on account of any defect in the records.

To move towards conclusive titling reforms are required at two levels — the legal framework and government process reengineering. The efforts towards conclusive titling began in 2008 with the National Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP). Over the last decade DILRMP has been fairly successful in its objective of computerisation of land and registration records.

The central government had proposed a Model Land Titling Bill 2011. However that has not yet been taken up by most states. Only two states Rajasthan and Maharashtra have made some progress. Along with states the Centre also needs to enact law/amend the Registration Act 1908 one of the central laws governing land.

Despite all efforts progress towards a legal framework for conclusive titling has been limited. Therefore we are proposing an alternate model. Instead of moving from one titling system to another directly India may take an intermediate step of enacting a law for Certificate of Possessory Title (CoPT). It would essentially mean issuance of a CoPT to the owner upon registration of a possessory estate and after a few years thereafter the land would become eligible to enter the conclusive land titling system. We recommend a period of five years in this regard. To add further flexibility in operationalising CoPT along with the law around CoPT state governments may also consider passing state specific “stamp acts” like has already been done by in some states. Also registration of land needs to be made time-bound.

This proposal has clear advantages. One it would continue to indicate the vision to move towards conclusive titling and such clarity would quash any misapprehensions. As people register their land records under CoPT they would get five years and at the end if there have not been any competing claims on the land this could be converted into a conclusive land title. Two it would help formalise the on-ground reality where sometimes possession is used as a criterion to decide presumptive titles in India. Three this would also automatically clear the pendency of civil suits in many cases.

Also the DILRMP needs to be revamped and as part of DILRMP 2.0 we recommend that the Centre undertakes a drone and satellite imagery-based GIS tagged fresh survey of the entire territory of India. The existing cadastral survey maps could be geo-referenced in this exercise to harmonise data between the current and the proposed system. Together these would create new survey maps of the land records system that would govern land administration.

The operations of land administration also may adopt the state-wide enterprise architecture approach and all institutional operators such as the departments of registration land and surveys urban and municipal affairs may use the same architecture and an integrated land database for smooth operations. Andhra Pradesh has already taken a lead in this regard. This may be adopted by others. Further unique land parcel IDs having inbuilt identifiers of type of land and location may be issued for all parcels of land. This has already been done in Uttar Pradesh.

The computerised land and registration records of the past decades which have been created as part of DILRMP may be used to establish a clear chain of presumptive title holders for all parcels of land. The unique IDs may also be mapped with the current title holders. This would assist in the issuance of CoPT later.

To move towards automatic mutation of land the registration and land departments could develop integrated business process flows with systems-based smart contract-like checks for automatic mutation. In sum if states enact CoPT and the Centre introduces DILRMP 2.0 and makes necessary amendments to the Registration Act it will unlock land’s true potential paving the way for a new paradigm.

This article first appeared in the print edition on October 30 2019 under the title ‘A certificate for the owner’. Bhandari is senior fellow at NCAER Kadyan is an IAS officer. Views are personal.

Minding the gaps in India’s data infrastructure

The national discourse can ill-afford the danger of being hijacked by the poor quality of data.

Last week demographers from around the world gathered in Delhi to mark 25 years of National Family Health Surveys (NFHS). It was both a celebratory and sombre moment. Policymakers and researchers celebrated tremendous achievements of four rounds of the NFHS since 1992-93; these have provided data on Indian families and allowed for development and evaluation of public policies regarding population health education and the empowerment of women. It was also heartening to see the political commitment towards ensuring the continuation of this outstanding survey programme at regular and predictable intervals. Nonetheless a single concern permeated the two-day conference. Can India’s existing data infrastructure support high quality data collection or are we staring at a precipice where deteriorating data quality will lead evidence-based policy development astray?

Presentations by Dr. Amy Tsui Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Santanu Pramanik Deputy Director National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)-National Data Innovation Centre on contraceptive use highlighted the difficulties in obtaining reliable high quality data. Between 2005-06 and 2015-16 the total fertility rate (TFR) declined from 2.68 to 2.18 births. However instead of being accompanied by increased contraceptive use as would happen during normal circumstances contraceptive use also declined from 56.3% to 53.5%. Using different approaches both Prof. Tsui and Dr. Pramanik came to the same conclusion — that this aberration must be attributed at least partially to declining quality of contraceptive use data in NFHS-4.

Much of the data quality discussions in the past have erupted when politically sensitive results around topics such as GDP growth rate or poverty rates have been released and partisan bickering allows for little room to think about data collection systems. A retrospective look at the way in which an outstanding programme of research such as the NFHS has changed over time along with the nation it chronicles and emerging challenges facing the NFHS and other data collection efforts provide an opportunity to look at overall challenges facing our data infrastructure in a constructive manner.

As Pravin Srivastava Chief Statistician of India noted at the NFHS conference there is an amazing greed for data in modern India. This greed ranges from wanting to evaluate success of Poshan Abhiyaan (nutrition programme) to measuring changes in the aspirational districts. However he also noted that the once vaunted Indian statistical infrastructure is crumbling and is not able to fulfil even its traditional tasks let alone meet these new demands.

Being realistic

I would like to submit that every government over the past two decades has been complicit in this neglect. If we are to move towards developing a more robust data infrastructure subscribing to the following core principles may be a good start. First set realistic goals and use creative strategies. In order to obtain data at the district level the sample size grew from about one lakh households in NFHS-3 to over six lakhs in NFHS-4. At that time the National Statistical Commission had expressed a concern that such an expansion may reduce data quality. There was a fair amount of agreement among the participants at the NFHS conference that this concern may have been prescient. The government’s need for district-level estimates of various health and population parameters is legitimate but do we need to rely on household surveys to obtain them? With a variety of small area estimation techniques available for pooling data from diverse sources to obtain robust estimates at district level it may make sense for us to think of alternatives and to make sure that we obtain required local government directory identifiers in each aspect of government data including Census sample registration system and Ayushman Bharat payment systems to ensure that these data can be pooled and leveraged.

Ensuring quality

Second adapt to changing institutional and technological environment for data collection. Veterans of the Indian statistical system blame deteriorating data quality on the move from regular employees to contract investigators at the National Sample Survey and use of for-profit data collection agencies in the NFHS. For better or worse that train has left the station. Rising government salaries combined with increased technological needs of modern data collection systems make it difficult to rely on veteran investigators in the civil services to meet all of government data needs. However if we are going to rely on outside data collectors what do we need to do to ensure quality? Some of the initiatives undertaken by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation for developing training programmes for investigators offer a welcome improvement but stop far short of the radical restructuring of data collection oversight.

I have enormous empathy for field investigators. They work under difficult conditions and are sometimes employed by for-profit agencies that require unrealistically high levels of output. Nonetheless this is the data that guides the policies affecting millions of Indians and must be faithfully collected. Where interviewers make a mistake they must be retrained. Where agencies impose an unrealistic workload they must be checked. However discovering mistakes after data collection has been completed is far too late to take any corrective steps. Concurrent monitoring using technologically-enabled procedures such as random voice recording of interviews judicious back checks and evaluation of agency and interviewer performance on parameters such as skipping sections inconsistent data and consistent misreporting may be needed to ensure quality. Academician Dr. Leela Visaria noted the declining role of State population research centres in NFHS data collection. It may be worth investigating if they can be involved in quality monitoring.

Need for exclusive units

Third establish research units exclusively focused on data collection and research design. At one point in time innovative research on the NSS was undertaken by an associated unit at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. Since the dissolution of this association very little research on data collection techniques takes place in India. We know little about whether men or women are better responders for data on household consumption expenditure. Nor do we know the extent of discrepancy in reporting on employment data between a direct response from women in the household vis-à-vis a proxy response via the household head. Do Likert scales that ask individuals to respond on their health status in five categories work well in India or do Indian respondents avoid choosing extreme categories? How does the presence of other people bias responses on contraceptive use? And does it have an equal impact on reported pill use as it does on sterilisation?

While research on data collection methods has stagnated research methodologies have changed phenomenally. Telephone surveys via random digit dialling or selection of respondents using voter lists are increasingly emerging as low-cost ways of collecting data. However we know little about representativeness of such samples. Are men or women more likely to respond to telephone surveys? Are migrants from other States well represented on the voter list?

Unless we pay systematic attention to the data infrastructure we are likely to have the national discourse hijacked by poor quality data as has happened in the past with a measurement of poverty or inconsistent data on GDP.

Sonalde Desai is Professor of Sociology University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre. The views expressed are personal

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