Following is an article by Prof. Dreze on the ’’India Shining’’
Advertising campaign of the NDA govt.
In a delightful book called How to Lie with Statistics, Darell Huff shows
how clever manipulation of statistics provides ample opportunities for
deceiving the innocent public. Judging from the recent blitz of
pro-government propaganda in the print media, the BJP wizards have not
only taken a leaf from Huff’s book but lifted his art to a new plane.
To illustrate, consider the recent full-page advertisement issued by the
National Commission on Population. The aim is to project a picture of
rapid demographic transition during the last three years. This claim is
not borne out by the facts, but no matter - creative presentation can take
care of that. The birth rate, for instance, barely declined during the
reference period - from 26 to 25 per thousand. But this information is
presented in the form of a graph where the scale of the vertical axis
starts at 24, so that visually, the change from 26 to 25 looks like a
decline of 50 per cent. For further enhancement of this optical illusion,
the birth rate level in each year is represented by the height of a
three-dimensional object. With the height declining by 50 per cent in the
graph, the volume of the object shrinks by much more than half, giving an
impression of massive reduction. The next graph, showing the change in
population growth rate, is even more misleading: the reduction is only
from 17.3 to 16.9, but the vertical axis starts at 16.7, giving the
impression of a sudden crash in the birth rate within three years.
Was this an isolated instance of deception? To scrutinise this hypothesis,
we examined all the government advertisements published in four English
dailies in the last few weeks. When the ads are lined up without gap, a
startling picture of systematic manipulation emerges.
Deceptive infographics are among the favourite tricks. The Khadi and
Village Industries Commission (KVIC), for instance, boasts that its
’performance graph is steep’. The accompanying graph, which shows
’cumulative earnings’, is indeed steep. But cumulative earnings are bound
to go up, by definition, and the slope can be made arbitrarily steep by
suitable stretching of the vertical axis or shrinking of the horizontal
axis. The claim that ’’the graph is steep’’ is, therefore, plain vacuous.
The accompanying statement that KVIC is ’’India’s biggest and fastest
growing marketer of consumer products’’ is no less perplexing.
This is not the only way in which vacuous achievements are glorified. The
ministry of communications, for instance, boasts that 37.5 lakh internet connections were created during the last five years, compared with ’only’
2.5 lakh during the preceding 50 years. It hardly matters that internet
connections did not exist during the best of the latter period. Perhaps it
would have been more appropriate to ask, say, how many posts of primary
teachers were created in each period. As it turns out, the annual increase
is virtually the same in both periods.
Elsewhere, failures are turned into successes. For instance, an
advertisement due to the food ministry congratulates ’’our farmers who have created surplus stocks of foodgrains, ensuring no death from hunger’’.
There is no reference here to the trail of hunger deaths that took place
in recent years in the shadow of gigantic food stocks - one of the worst
blots on the record of the present government. Similarly, the decimation
of handloom weaving all over India in recent years does not prevent the
prime minister from ’’weaving a bright future for handloom weavers’’ in an
ad prepared by the ministry of textiles. Reading the fine print, one finds
that the ’bright future’ of millions of impoverished weavers hinges on a
measly scheme for ’’reimbursement of rebate on sale of handloom cloth’’.
One ostensible aim of this barrage of propaganda is to manufacture an
entirely new image of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His photograph
looms large in more than two-thirds of the advertisements. Over and over
again, he is projected as a dynamic leader and praised for his ’visionary
leadership’. This is quite a reincarnation for someone with a propensity
for ’’interminable silences, indecipherable ramblings and, not
infrequently, falling asleep in meetings’’, as Time magazine put it. And if
you think that Time is biased, read India Today. In a glowing tribute to
him, published some weeks ago, Vajpayee was praised as an ’’inaction hero’’,
champion of ’’Gandhian passive resistance’’. Due credit was also given to
his ’’political philosophy’’ of ’’duality’’: ’’He says one thing and it means
two things.’’
When factual evidence of achievements is stubbornly wanting, rhetoric
steps in. An advertisement by IFFCO, for instance, claims that the prime
minister’s ’’foresightful [sic] initiatives’’ have ushered in ’’golden era
for agriculture’’. This is quite a metaphor, considering that the
agricultural sector has been in the doldrums for years. In fact, the
growth of per capita agricultural production virtually came to a halt in
the Nineties, and turned negative during the last five years.
Another way around the lack of evidence is to focus on ’targets’ rather
than achievements. For instance, the Planning Commission highlights ’’the
reduction in infant mortality rate to 45 per 1, 000 live births’’. Careful
reading reveals that this is not an achievement, but a target for 2007.
Considering that India’s infant mortality rate today is still around 70,
one is curious to learn what kind of revolutionary changes in public
policy are expected to trigger this steep decline within three years. But
there is no mention of policy changes in the advertisement - only
’targets’. Perhaps it is not surprising that the focus shifts from
achievements to targets when it comes to social development issues,
considering that India is hardly ’shining’ in this respect. In fact,
India’s rank in the international scale of ’human development’ indices
fell last year from 124th to 127th.
In a different genre, some ads credit Vajpayee with achievements that are
actually due to other governments or parties. For instance, the ministry
of environment and forests associates him with ’’successful tiger
conservation’’, evident in a substantial increase in the tiger population
in ’’the last three decades’’. What is not mentioned is that the key to this
success, Project Tiger, was initiated by Indira Gandhi and ran into
trouble soon after her death. During the last ten years, there has been no
increase in India’s tiger population. In fact, according to the former
director of Project Tiger, P.K. Sen, ’’the number of tigers in India has
crashed to below 3, 000 and is still falling rapidly’’. Not content with
this subterfuge, the ministry goes on to claim that ’’by protecting our
national animal we have managed our forests, our ecological wealth, our
food and water security’’ - nothing less.
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