NA body fails fifth time to advance statistics bill

Meeting was meant to consider the approval of the General Statistics Reorganisation Act 2010.

ISLAMABAD: The head of an important parliamentary body has decided to get some of its members removed after his fifth attempt at gathering at least four parliamentarians to complete a quorum failed again and further delayed the process of providing autonomy to the statistics division.

The fifth meeting of the National Assembly standing committee on economic affairs and Statistics was meant to consider the approval of the General Statistics Reorganisation Act 2010. However, the meeting could not last for even 15 minutes following its start with a delay of an hour.

A member of the committee, Liaquat Abbas Bhatti, came and signed the attendance sheet and left the meeting even before it started, leaving the chair and the other three members pondering over how to complete the quorum. The scheduled time of 2 pm was not honoured and the meeting started at 3 pm, and another member, Nafeesa Shah, left the room 15 minutes later saying that she had to attend another meeting.

The chairman of the committee, Malik Azmat Khan of the Pakistan Peoples Party, decided to request Labour Minister Khursheed Shah to expel those members, who have not been attending the committee meetings, from the party.

“The passage of the bill is very important for keeping the government out of the affairs of the statistics department,” said Hina Rabbani Khar, the minister of state for economic affairs.

The bill has been pending with the standing committee for the last nine months. “The standing committee’s inability to clear the bill shows how serious parliamentarians are about legislation,” said an official of the statistics division.

The General Statistics Reorganisation Bill 2010 is designed on the insistence of international donor agencies to overhaul the statistical system, which has lost credibility in the eyes of the masses due to the government’s alleged manipulation of inflation and national growth figures. Even last year’s economic growth of 4.1 per cent is controversial.

The stated objectives of the bill are to increase credibility by giving autonomy to the statistics division, which after the approval of the bill, will be an autonomous body called the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.

“Statistics should be credible, timely and of high quality and the manipulation of numbers has to be done away with,” said Asif Bajwa, the secretary of the statistics division. The bill proposes to give administrative and financial autonomy to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics by separating it from the finance division and allocating separate funds for it.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 8^th, 2010.