This report constructs a Rural Multidimensional Deprivation Index (RDI) for measuring deprivation in Jharkhand. An important feature of the index is that it is constructed using indicators on provisioning of basic infrastructural amenities at the village level. This is different from the usual poverty indices that are composed of financial indicators such as income or consumption; or indicators measuring development outcomes such as educational or nutritional levels. Observing the provisioning of basic infrastructural amenities, this report makes focused policy suggestions that can be easily implemented by functionaries working on the ground. The data for the index is sourced from the Mission Antyodaya Survey, which was carried out in 2019 at the village level across the country. The survey collects data related to provisioning and outcome of basic amenities in villages, along with demographic and socioeconomic variables. Because this is a periodic survey, it enables us to track the developmental progress of each village, district, state and the country over time. In total, there are about 182 variables that were captured in the 2019 round. The survey covers 31,175 out of 32,620 villages in Jharkhand, which is 95.6 percent of the total number of villages in the state; and 6,48,358 out of 6,67,933 villages in India, or 97.1 percent of the villages in the country.

Editors

Prasanna S, Sandhya Krishnan, Sanket Gharat, Puja Guha, Amalendu Jyotishi, Neeraj Hatekar

This article presents a historical account of emergence and development of the territorial power of Jats in Punjab through analysing three elements. First, their historical appropriation of the village as their agrarian territory, which was often perpetuated under the discourse of ​‘village community’/clans and the monopolisation of the peasant identity. Second, the often-benevolent administration in Punjab during the colonial rule. Third, the development of a discourse of caste-progressiveness of Jats. The Punjab experience in this regard is significant to understand similar processes in other states and to make appropriate strategies for social movements and policy advocacy regarding agrarian/​social reforms.

Résumé

Cet article présente un compte rendu historique de l’émergence et du développement du pouvoir territorial des Jats au Pendjab en analysant trois éléments. Premièrement, leur appropriation historique du village en tant que territoire agraire, qui s’est souvent perpétuée sous le discours de la « communauté villageoise »/​clans et de la monopolisation de l’identité paysanne. Deuxièmement, l’administration souvent bénévole du Pendjab pendant la période coloniale. Troisièmement, le développement d’un discours sur la progressivité de la caste des Jats. L’expérience du Pendjab à cet égard est importante pour comprendre des processus similaires dans les autres États et pour élaborer des stratégies appropriées pour les mouvements sociaux et le plaidoyer politique concernant les réformes agraires/​sociales.

Some experts consider ​“food” as the most critical issue of the 21^st century. Countries such as India are experiencing what has been described as a triple burden of malnutrition – characterised by high prevalence of undernutrition, obesity, and micro-nutrient deficiency. These are a result of inadequate access to healthy foods, increased use of highly processed foods, and low dietary diversity, besides factors related to sanitation. Changes in the practice of agriculture has resulted in a reduction in agrobiodiversity. The challenges to accessing food during shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic and conflicts in various parts of the world demonstrated the importance of local food security and reminded people of the importance of local food sources, including uncultivated or wild foods.

Authors:

Adithya Pradyumna, 
Sudha Nagavarapu, 
Sorappalli M Chandrashekar, 
Shashiraj Haratale, 
Muskan Babajan and 
Communities of Chintamani

Small-scale fisheries play an important economic, social and cultural role in coastal Karnataka even today despite being subjected to several natural and anthropogenic stressors for a long time. They are neglected or even outright discouraged in the state’s fisheries policymaking, and their contributions to the state’s fish supply and their role in livelihood creation do not receive the due recognition. This paper is premised on the recognition of emerging stressors that pose a threat to the viability of small-scale fisheries. The impacts of these stressors have implications not only for the environment but also for nutrition, particularly among vulnerable populations, and the overall socio-economic stability of coastal communities that rely on fishing as a livelihood. The goals of this paper are to provide a thorough review of literature around these stressors, and to describe how these are being played out in coastal Karnataka. Among these stressors, we delve in depth on the new Blue Economy policy of India since it is likely to have severe antagonistic effects in combination with other anthropogenic stressors. Our opinion is, Karnataka has already started witnessing many of these ramifications of interventions/​stressors and the coastal landscape of the state is set to be transformed over the next couple of decades or so. Small-scale fisheries of the state are likely to be some of the most impacted communities from these interventions.

Authors:  Shruthi Suripeddi, Prasanna Surathkal, Amalendu Jyotishi, and Ramachandra Bhatta

Energy poverty related to a reliance on traditional biomass for cooking has a strong association with environmental degradation, gender inequity and human health. Reduction of energy poverty is a growing concern in public policy agenda globally. In India, the last decade has seen concerted efforts to provide clean cooking fuel to the population. Despite this, wide regional disparities in energy poverty exist in India, indicating differential regional impacts of policies. A shift to universal access to clean modern cooking fuel requires the redesign of policies, with insights from a decentralized understanding of actual drivers of household cooking energy choices across diverse regions. The paper attempts to explain household cooking fuel choices under multiple fuel use (fuel stacking) scenarios in two states of India, differentiated by their socio-economic status and development trajectories. The paper employs multinomial logistic (MNL) regression on household level data from the Indian Human Development Survey 2015 to identify factors determining fuel choices. Urbanization, per capita income, the educational attainment of the household head and women in the household, having a separate kitchen for cooking and not living in one’s own house were observed to be positively influencing a switch to clean cooking energy in both the states. The results of the study indicate that shifting out of energy poverty and achieving the goal of universal clean cooking energy would require combining ongoing welfare policies with policies on provisioning clean cooking energy in India.

Authors:  M Manjula

The study explores the role of fish consumption in addressing nutrition security and malnutrition in a rural village in Telangana, India. It highlights that fish, particularly small indigenous species, provide affordable, high-quality protein and micronutrients. The study compares fish with other protein sources like poultry and livestock, finding that fish consumption significantly meets the nutritional needs of the rural population more effectively than other animal sources. India, despite being the third-largest fish producer globally, still faces challenges with malnutrition, especially among children and women. National Family Health Survey (NFHS) reports show alarming rates of stunting, wasting, and anemia, particularly in Telangana. The study demonstrates how increased fish consumption can play a crucial role in reducing these malnutrition rates by offering a cost-effective and nutrient-dense food source. The state government has encouraged fish production in Telangana through subsidies and initiatives like Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana. However, the research suggests that the fish distribution infrastructure needs significant improvement to increase access to fish for the broader population. The paper concludes that promoting fish consumption can be a viable strategy to combat malnutrition, improve food security, and provide economic opportunities for rural communities. Policy recommendations include enhancing market infrastructure, increasing fish production through scientific aquaculture, and raising awareness about the nutritional benefits of fish. These measures could ensure that fish contributes more significantly to achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) related to hunger and malnutrition.

Authors: Gummadi Sridevi, Amalendu Jyotishi, Balaji Patturi, Matta Srinivas

While the 73^rd and 74^th constitutional amendments contributed to the increase in women elected representatives in the Indian political ecosystem, the efficacy of this phenomenon has been questioned multiple times. The evidence points out that electoral participation is merely a symbolic gesture, which ultimately undercuts women’s empowerment by co-opting them into a patently corrupt, male-dominated political system. It is widely acknowledged that the political journey is not smooth for elected women representatives (EWR) in a patriarchal society, which is further divided on caste lines. Due to the existing structural challenges and insufficient support system, EWRs take a longer time to understand their responsibilities and perform their duties effectively. Training and awareness-building programmes of the state government and NGOs have had limited success in solving these challenges. Therefore, this research project was taken up by faculty and students of Azim Premji University to understand the challenges faced by EWRs, and thereby, design training modules, which will help them resolve these challenges. Data collection was done in seven panchayats around Azim Premji University. EWRs along with other respondents have given us substantial insights based on which an attempt to create a typology of challenges by EWRs is made.

Hand book for a course on Community Forest Rights for the tribal youth in Kerala Azim Premji University’s FRA initiative, in collaboration with the Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA), launched a two-months long course on Forest Rights Act (2006), focusing on the Community Forest Rights (CFR). The course was tailor made for the tribal youth in the state of Kerala, following case studies[1][2][3] and orientation workshops conducted between 2020 and 2022. This handbook is the basic resource for this training. Students are expected to be informed and equipped for initiating the vesting of CFR working with their gram sabhas. Course Content and Delivery: The pedagogical approach is a blend of class room and hands-on learning, including field visits and computer lab sessions. There are three weeks of classroom interactions and five weeks of hands-on learning. The course has four units: the first unit, ​‘Tribals and forests – a historical perspective,’ examines the historical context of tribal issues both globally and within the regional landscape. Second unit, ​‘Understanding FRA,’ covers the history of FRA and comprehensively unpacks the Act, Rules, and the implementation challenges. Unit 3,‘Skills & competencies for Community Forest Resource Management (CFRM)’ imparts specific skills including accountancy, communication and mobilization skills as well as biodiversity management, necessary for effective implementation of CFR. The fourth unit ​‘Individual field project’ is to be carried out by each student in two phases: (a)identification of the challenges and opportunities for implementation of FRA — for 2 weeks (b) finding responses to address the specific challenges identified during the first phase of 2 weeks. [1]https://practiceconnect.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/implementation-of-forest-rights-act-observations-from-keralas-attappadi-block/ [2]https://practiceconnect.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/implementation-of-forest-rights-act-lessons-from-vazhachal-division-of-kerala/ [3]https://practiceconnect.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/implementation-of-forest-rights-act-observations-from-wayanad-district-of-kerala/

This article synthesises the evidence on the impact of interventions supporting adolescent girls’ and young women’s education on delaying marriage, childbearing and improving work participation. A total of 13 studies (eight from sub-Saharan Africa and five from South Asia) during the years 2000 – 2020 met our inclusion criteria. A major focus of the included studies was to reduce the schooling cost, with limited focus on strategies such as supplementary coaching, making schools girl-friendly, monitoring performance and sensitising communities about educating girls. Most studies that measured the effects on marriage and childbearing showed a positive impact. However, interventions were less successful in influencing work participation. Although a majority of studies reported positive effects on educational outcomes, fewer measured or reported positive effects on other social and health outcomes. This evidence synthesis suggests a need for studying long-term effects of such interventions on girls’ and women’s families, work and social life to inform policy. Studies that explore the varying impacts of such interventions on girls and women from different sociocultural settings are needed. Our evidence synthesis underscores the importance of making comprehensive efforts to support girls’ education in order to meet the global development commitments of ensuring equitable life opportunities for adolescent girls and young women.

It has been reported from various contexts that learning quantitative methods for public health and social research is challenging for students. Based on our observations of these challenges, we designed a simulation-based pedagogical tool called Surveypura to support classroom-based learning of quantitative research methods. The tool includes a large illustration of a fictional village with 155 houses, alongside data for each of the households. The features of the houses, household characteristics, and the village have been carefully designed to give the visual feel of an actual village and better assist the pedagogical process. The tool was used by five facilitators with their master’s students at Azim Premji University in courses on social research and epidemiology. Our observations of the sessions and interactions with facilitators and students suggested that the tool supported more engaged learning of quantitative research methods in a non-intimidating manner. We believe that Surveypura can be a useful simulation-based pedagogical tool to teach quantitative research methods in epidemiology and social sciences even in other contexts.

Explore more here.

If one asks a teacher in preschool learning spaces in India, about the most usual story that is narrated to children, what is the most common answer? Will there be unanimity in the fact that the story of Thirsty Crow works just as well in many Indian languages, as it does in Indian Sign Language? Those who engage with early childhood care and learning would often stress upon the need to have a visually rich environment in these learning spaces, full of picture books and enthusiastic teachers who never give up a chance to bring out yet another story. Bringing Indian Sign Language to early childhood learning spaces, creating an immersive experience for children before they enter school years by making available in these spaces Indian Sign Language resources (and then taking such initiatives to schools, colleges, and community spaces) would allow us to slowly move toward the dream cherished by deaf adults.

In a homogenised imagination of human aspirations, development interventions replicate popular models, including intensive farming in Adivasi landscapes. In the process, they try to sedentarise and individualise Adivasi communities living in the forest peripheries. Even as modernisation remains an elusive target in most of the tribal belts, ethnic socio-ecological institutions become redundant, leaving the community deskilled — ecologically, socially, and economically. Adivasi’s concerns about this conventional development process entailing detribalisation are seldom deliberated in literature and among the community. 

Institutional births increased in India from 39% to 79% between 2005 and 2015. Drawing from 17 months of fieldwork, this article traces the shift from home to hospital births across three generations in a hamlet in Assam in Northeast India. Here, too, one finds that most births have shifted from home to hospital in less than a decade, aided by multiple factors. These include ​‘free’ birthing facilities and financial incentives offered by government schemes, idiosyncratic changes within the hamlet, such as the introduction of biomedical practices through home births where oxytocin was used, and changes in cultural belief systems among local people. The exploration reveals significant transitions between (and fluidities of) categories such as local/​global, tradition/​modernity, past/​present and nature/​technology, creating a complex and ambivalent narrative of change, in which the voices of mothers should not be ignored.

This case study is of ​“India’s First Fully Solar Powered Village”2 — Dharnai. It is a case of the promises of and challenges facing the realisation of ​“energy democracy” — the idea that distributed renewable energy systems have the potential to democratise the economy and society.

Constitutional measures to ensure fair compensation and livelihood security to the land losing refugees of development processes, overlook the complexity of ​‘public purpose’ — the dominant rationale behind operationalizing ​‘eminent domain’ of the state. Popular perception of public purpose as urbanization muffles the de facto social citizenship around plural values of agricultural landscapes. Ignoring the enduring public purposes served by agrarian landscapes aids in underestimating the longterm welfare impacts on displaced farmers.

This working paper studied individual religiosity, trust, and trustworthiness to find that more religious people are more likely to exhibit greater trustworthiness even if religiosity does not predict trust.

This article discusses an intervention for rehabilitation of female survivors of violence that reconceptualises rehabilitation through a feminist lens: the Sampoornata model of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), which has been created and is being practiced by an NGO called Kolkata Sanved in Kolkata, India. Feminist rehabilitation is seen as a perspective which, in contrast to dominant rehabilitation praxis, recognises that individual experiences of violence are embedded in patriarchal social structures and aims for survivors to internalise a sense of agency by deconstructing internalised patriarchal norms that legitimise violence against women and girls and stigmatisation of survivors. The article highlights how Sampoornata enacts feminist rehabilitation through the medium of the body. Survivors reclaim the body from patriarchal control and reflect on the embodied experience in order to question patriarchal norms, remove self-blame, and negotiate a space for themselves within society.

This working paper studied farmers’ perspectives on their future as beneficiaries of wastewater (domestic sewage with industrial effluents) generated in the Vrishabhavathy watershed of Bengaluru city.

Yellow foot Clam (Paphia malabarica) fishery of the Ashtamudi lake, one of the deepest lakes in Kerala supports the livelihoods of thousands of clam-collectors in the region. These clams are highly demanded in the international market and it enables the clam-collectors to generate their income through export began in late 80s. An increased export market demand exerted a lot of pressure on the resource which ultimately led to the depletion of clam resources. As a response to this unexpected decline in resource size and lost income, the clam collector community in Ashtamudi came forward to address the issue by forming a collective of clam-collectors at the village level. As a management strategy, they voluntarily abstained from fishing during the breeding season and demanded management of resource through a participatory mode of governance. After years of experience in the management of resource through voluntary measures, Ashtamudi clam resource entered a new regime of resource management. It got certified as ​“sustainable” resource by the world’s largest marine wild-catch certification program, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) which promotes the governance of marine fisheries resources through market incentives. This study is an attempt to understand these varied and unique governance regime experiences of clam resource from participatory to market-based systems and the implications of these governance regimes in the property rights, livelihoods and social development of clam-collectors of Ashtamudi.

Modern India has a history of a vibrant and active social sector. Many local development organisations, community organisations, social movements and non-governmental organisations populate the space of social action. Such organisations imagine a different future and plan and implement social interventions at different scales, many of which have lasting impact on the lives of people and society. However, their efforts and, more importantly, the learning from these initiatives remains largely unknown not only in the public sphere but also in the worlds of ​‘development practice’ and ​‘development education’. This shortfall impedes the process of learning and growth across interventions, organisations and time.

This paper examines Manipur’s census statistics for the period between 1991 and 2011. It argues that conventional demographic factors cannot explain the abnormal population growth rates reported in parts of Manipur and that the abnormalities in the headcount might instead be explained by the manipulation of census data driven by political and economic considerations. Manipur’s experience is used to draw attention to systemic problems related to the inadequacy of metadata supplied by the Census of India, the lack of guidelines for the correction of census data, the impact of political interference on data quality and the cascading effect of errors in fundamental statistics such as headcount on other government statistics.

Recent work on informal urbanism argues that ​‘informality’ is a strong force in determining and shaping how cities in the global south grow, and hence needs to be a part of emergent urban theory. This paper uses this argument as a starting point, drawing upon the work of scholars who suggest that urban informality may have an organizing logic, a system of norms that emerge from the economic conditions and the social needs of people. Specifically, this paper examines informality in the urban space as an outcome of spatial and economic changes in a market precinct in Bangalore. It finds that activities in the street are temporal in nature. In this paper, the ordinary city encapsulates how people use urban spaces on an everyday basis and the extraordinary city reflects how urban spaces are transformed during a periodic, religious and cultural festival. The paper makes two key contributions, one, to show through an in-depth spatial ethnographic study how the ​‘ordinary – extraordinary’ might help us understand informal urbanism and two, to propose that it may be useful to have intermediate levels of planning that incorporate the conditions of the ​‘ordinary’ city as well as the ​‘extraordinary’ city, thereby contributing to both theory and practice.

While India has made progress in achieving important health sector goals, there is still a long way to go. The Government of India has adopted decentralization or devolution with the objective of promoting greater equity and supporting people-centred, responsive health systems. We report on a study that problematizes the idea of strengthening health sector governance through decentralization and that explores the intersection of the political goal of enhanced local-level autonomy and the programmatic goal of more responsive health service delivery. The study examines the extent to which both political and programmatic decentralization are functional at the village level; looks at the design and objectives of decentralization at the village level; and considers whether sustained and supportive capacity building can create the necessary conditions for more genuine de facto decentralization and empowerment of village-level functionaries. Our methodology included semi-structured interviews with village-level functionaries in two districts of Karnataka, based on which we designed an Action Research to strengthen coordination and synergy between the functionaries responsible for political and programmatic decentralization. We found that both political and programmatic decentralization at the village level are at risk due to a lack of convergence between the political and programmatic arms of the government. This is substantially due to problems inherent in the design of the decentralization mechanism at the district level and below. Sustained capacity building can contribute to the more effective application of decentralization mechanisms, but systemic issues regarding the decentralization mechanisms need to be addressed alongside. We were also able to identify some spaces where coordination between village-level functionaries is possible, and the steps that need to be taken to build on this potential.

Most discussions on the quality of government data overlook the legal framework within which data are collected. This paper examines India’s Census Act, 1948, which provides the legal-administrative framework for conducting human population census. The Act stipulates punishment for interfering with the process of enumeration, but the punitive provisions are rarely used and have not been invoked to deal with cases of mass manipulation of the census. Major instances of manipulation were, in fact, reported in 1951 and 2001 after the government introduced additional punitive measures in 1948 and 1994, respectively. This paper compares the Census Act, 1948 with other Indian laws related to the collection of statistics as well as census laws of other common law countries and identifies the structural flaws of the Indian law vis-à-vis manipulation. It uses simple games to explain why the punitive provisions of the Census Act, 1948 are redundant in the event of mass manipulation and suggests that the problem can be addressed without recourse to law. The insights drawn from the games are examined in light of the experience of Nagaland, a state of India where census statistics were manipulated on a large scale in 2001.

Despite economic debacles, recurring ​“accidents”, reactor core meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukushima and the cautious academic reflection it has engendered, civilian nuclear power continues to enjoy legitimacy in energy policy discourse. This may not be the case in all countries. But it is so in a number of influential states, such as, prominently, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Why does nuclear power persist in these and other key countries, such as India or Iran and Japan? How is it that economic costs, technology risks and weapons proliferation concerns point in one direction while energy policy and technology choice moves in the other? We suggest that for an important set of select countries this divergence can be ascribed to a ​“discourse of power” that is pegged to domestic concerns and, more importantly, to international relations. This discursive process constructs energy and material abundance as the cornerstone of social stability, political power and ultimately national sovereignty and geopolitical influence. The atom’s energy remains prominent in such imaginaries of abundance, more so in contexts of fossil energy insecurity and climate change. The questioning then of nuclear power by environmental and social concerns has to also question this discourse of power. The latter’s sanguinity vis-a-vis abundant energy needs to be problematised. This is not the case today in international relations. Practitioners focus on the consequences of environmental deterioration. The problem of climate refugees, for example. This paper argues that realist frames of power and self-interest in international relations be acknowledged explicitly as drivers of the discourse of power and in turn the socio-ecological consequences that ensue from this pursuit of cheap and abundant energy. To challenge nuclear power ultimately is to also challenge this medieval yet dominant norm of power play that pervades large swathes of international relations.

There is no globally established standard for measuring malnutrition among children aged 5 – 18 years. Growth references are used as a standard but there are many limitations to using such references to assess nutritional status of Indian children. As per the World Health Organization, standards and references both serve as a basis for comparison, but each enables a different interpretation. A standard defines how children should grow; and deviations from the pattern it prescribes are evidence of abnormal growth. A reference, on the other hand, does not provide a basis for such value judgments, although in practice, references often are mistakenly used as standards. This paper has conducted a methodological review of prevalence of malnutrition from openly accessible literature pertaining to assessment of nutritional status of school-going children in India from the year 2000 to 2016. The methodological review reveals that a combination of different national and international references have been used in assessing nutritional status of Indian children. International references includes NCHS 1977, CDC 2000, WHO 2007, IOTF 2012 extended Body Mass Index (BMI) cut- offs, Gomez classification, Waterlow’s classification and national references such as — Agarwal standards, ICMR reference values, IAP reference and BMI cut-off for overweight & obesity of Indian children. A new national growth reference has been recently developed by Marwaha and others (2011) for BMI, but no assessment of nutritional status using this reference was found. Each of these methods was then applied to a database containing height, weight, age and sex of 5340 school-going children. Though there are three nutritional indicators for school-age children, majority of the study conducted used only BMI chart to assess nutritional status. Therefore BMI-for-age is considered for the analysis to i) understand the methodological application of the above growth references ii) compare the differences in nutritional status and iii) recommend an appropriate growth reference (from those available) to assess the nutritional status of Indian school-age children. The literature review also reveals that malnutrition among school-age children is prevalent in India. There is no national level data available to support this judgement across regions, gender and caste. Given a likely high prevalence of malnutrition, this paper calls for the development of a growth standard to measure malnutrition among school-age children in India. Though this paper is focused on malnutrition, it simultaneously provides similar importance to over growth. A growth Standard therefore fills up such gaps in measuring double burden of malnutrition i.e. under-nutrition and over-nutrition.

Cities of the Global South are expanding both spatially and demographically. While urbanization may contribute to economic growth and employment generation, the impacts of urbanization on sustainability of cities is manifold. One area that is witnessing rapid land use change as a result of urbanization is the peri-urban interface of cities in India. This is especially true in the case of natural spaces that are also common pool resources. In this working paper, we examine the transformation of lakes in the peri-urban interface of Bengaluru city in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Based on GPS observations and interviews, we found that lakes in our study area varied in status and use: ranging from those in a good condition that served multiple uses to those converted to other forms of land use, resulting in loss of all services. We also accessed archival information to underscore the role that one of the lakes in the study area played in serving as a source of water during a time of scarcity. Using the example of lakes in Bengaluru, this paper presents the threats faced by commons in the peri-urban interface of rapidly expanding cities in the Global South. These threats are not restricted to changes to land use alone, but also concern their transformation into recreational sites at the cost of users who depend on them for livelihood and subsistence. We argue for management of the lakes in the peri-urban interface not only as ecosystems that supports ecological and economic uses, but as commons that are a reflection of the diversity and heterogeneity that cities such as Bengaluru represent.

Sample surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) are the most widely used sources of household level information about consumption, employment, and other socio-economic indicators in India. The representativeness of samples, the wide range of topics surveyed, and the availability of a long-time series are some of the reasons for the appeal of NSSO data for research and policy. This paper assesses the quality of the NSSO data for Nagaland and Jammu and Kashmir, which lie in India’s politically restive ethno-geographical periphery. It argues that the NSSO data for these states during 1973 – 2014 lack representativeness and inter-temporal comparability due to faulty sampling frames, frame and sample non-coverage, and biased samples. It quantifies the impact of data quality on statistics of interest to policy-makers. The paper shows that the estimates of monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) are sensitive to non-coverage and argues that the incidence of poverty is underestimated because NSSO surveys failed to capture the complete distribution of consumption expenditure due to non-coverage. In Nagaland, the degree of non-coverage was so high that in most years between 1993 – 94 and 2011-12 the state’s poverty headcount ratio was the lowest in the country despite the possible overestimation of its poverty line. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the use of non-representative survey data. Put together, the unreliability of government statistics in Jammu and Kashmir and Nagaland highlights systemic problems that have wider implications for our understanding of the relationship between state, statistics, and policy-making.