Vikas Kumar

The timeliness dimension of data quality has not received sufficient scholarly attention even though the publication of official statistics of various countries are often delayed. This paper examines the growing delays in the release of census data in India amidst the technocratisation of policy-making, public professions of faith in evidence based policy-making and growing fascination with big data. We show that the growing delay in the release of census data of India is a fact, rather than a mere allegation, and contextualise the problem by comparing seven decennial censuses conducted between 1951 and 2011. We suggest that delays can be measured vis-à-vis usual , desirable , declared and feasible schedules of publication. Further, delays can be understood from the perspectives of the unwillingness of the government statistical system to face public scrutiny, decline in the quality of public goods, political interference and, in case of data on identity, communalisation of politics.

There is a growing awareness in India of the need to nurture indigenous international relations (IR) traditions. India’s IR community, though, has only a cursory familiarity with indigenous traditions. Most Indian IR scholars and practitioners invoke indigenous traditions in a superficial manner. Non-English nouns are superimposed on full-fledged analyses, which creates an illusory bond with the tradition, rather than being an organic part of the argument. Often such nouns are either not found in the original sources referred to or appear in a very different context in those sources. Hurried attempts to indigenise Indian IR thought and practice result in a clumsy repackaging of contemporary ideas as ‘traditional Indian.’ It is only through empirically and theoretically sound protocols of recovery/re-engagement that the IR community can learn to think in and through the Indian tradition, and adapt the tradition to speak to contemporary challenges. Presently, without the scaffolding of heterodox Western IR traditions and Western scholarship on pre-modern Indian languages and knowledge traditions, India’s Anglophonic IR community cannot even critique the mainstream paradigm of the West. As a result, despite India’s long history of reflection on interstate relations, Western assessments and theorizations continue to dominate the modern scholarship on India’s IR, with Indians mostly reacting to foreign assessments.

Given the tendency of nascent democracies to relapse, observers have debated how stable Myanmar’s political and economic transitions are and if the international community can offer any help. The books under review caution against treating Myanmar as a tabula rasa waiting to be inscribed with alien dreams. They uncover a complex institutional topography, where imported reform packages will do more harm than good. Indeed, the motivation for and the shape of Myanmar’s reforms are almost entirely indigenous. The decision to open-up the polity and economy was taken in the late 1980s. The army's inability to handle political dissent derailed the nascent reforms though and the subsequent international sanctions pushed Myanmar toward China. Eventually, the compulsion to reduce the ‘unbalanced,’ ‘asymmetric’ and ‘involuntary’ dependence upon China provided the trigger for reforms. The pace of reforms will, however, depend largely on domestic factors including the loosening of the army’s grip over avenues of socioeconomic mobility. The majority community’s Buddhist background will also play a major role in shaping Myanmar’s political future. It remains to be seen whether Buddhism will constrain Myanmar to follow the path of other Theravada Buddhist societies or enable it to evolve into a deliberative, transformational democracy.