SEMAINE D'ÉTUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ANALYSE ECONOMETRIQUE ETC. 116. 
country like India, the official figures are often unreliable for food- 
grains. There is no concept of checks and cross-checks. It is due to 
treating statistics as legal evidence, that is, to consider that its sanc- 
tion depends on the level of authority which gives administrative 
approval. The Food and Agriculture Ministry in India gives some 
estimates of foodgrains; as this Ministry is in administrative charge of 
matters relating to foodgrains, its estimate is the only one which must 
be accepted (in the sense of a law court accepting legal evidence). 
Even if another Ministry or Department of Government indepen- 
dently make some other estimate (say, from consumption side) then 
that estimate is not « official » in the legal sense and cannot be 
used. In fact, in India, it has been urged that only one agency 
should collect each type of statistics because multiplicity of agencies 
might lead to differing estimates which would be confusing; in other 
words, the very possibility of having checks and cross-checks must 
be eliminated. It is a somewhat paradoxical situation. India has 
some kind of reputation outside India for its statistics; but Indian 
statistics remains weak because statistics is treated as a matter of 
legal evidence and not of scientific validity. The official figures of 
foodgrains in India (based on so-called complete enumeration of all 
agricultural holdings), in my personal judgement, may be unde- 
restimates by some thing of the order of 20 or 25 per cent. The 
production of wheat and rice and other foodgrains can be estimated 
through samples on the basis of the area sown together with the 
yield per hectare ascertained by crop-cutting experiments. The con- 
sumption of foodgrains can also be ascertained through a sample 
of all households in the country. A direct ‘comparison is then pos- 
sible between such estimates of consumption with the independent 
estimates of production after allowing for seeds, inventory, loss in 
storage etc. As there would be at least two sub-samples and two 
independent estimates of both consumption and production, such 
comparisons can be carried out in an entirely scientific way. In 
the case of a cash crop like jute, during the war, the production 
estimates given in October of one year could be verified about 15 
months later from the utilization estimates based on figures for 
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