The government is planning to work on developing methodologies for production indices for health and education sector as part of its offer. It is to develop an index of service production in the lines of the sign of Industrial Production. The ministry of statistics and programme already implemented methodologies for organizing service production indices for transport sectors. Now they set its vision on the social sectors of health and education, although lack of sound and sufficient data is blocking it from doing so.
They are now working on developing the methodologies for new sectors which are education and health, but revealed getting reliable data was difficult. In education, the measures being considered are teacher-student ratio and gross enrolment ratio. The benchmarks are still to be zeroed in for the medical sector.
Because of paucity of data the government has still not finalised the base years for the two sectors and the work is still at an initial stage. In the first stage, the government had developed methodologies for sign selection for railways, air transport, postal services, banking and telecommunication, based on recommendations of the C P Chandrasekhar-led technical advisory committee (TAC).
These experimental indices have been worked out and would be used in quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) estimates. To highlight the importance of the services sector the ministry of statistics and programme implementation also plans to take up an annual survey of services. For this former chief economist advisor Arvind Virmani has setup a committee. This panel would also look at the index of service prices and trade in services, among others.
With the approval of the methodology by the TAC, the Central Statistics Organisation had finalised experimental indices for the sub sectors of railways and air transport with base year as 2004-05, covering the period from 2005-06 till 2010-11.
The National Statistical Commission wants the indices to be released by the respective line ministries periodically but that is not happening.CSOwill integrate indices of the transport sector after the individual ministries start reporting this data.
