{"id":4485,"date":"2016-05-20T15:40:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T10:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=4485"},"modified":"2016-05-20T15:40:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T10:10:26","slug":"why-is-arvind-panagariya-cherry-picking-data-to-show-modi-govt-in-good-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2016\/05\/20\/why-is-arvind-panagariya-cherry-picking-data-to-show-modi-govt-in-good-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Arvind Panagariya Cherry Picking Data to Show Modi Govt in Good Light?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Narendra Modi government will be completing two years next week. Given this, currently there is a lot of propaganda on. The finance minister Arun Jaitley has been giving interviews highlighting the good performance of the government.<\/p>\n
The Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, economist Arvind Panagariya, has also been writing columns in newspapers talking about the good show of the Modi government. There is nothing wrong with this. It is the right of every government to highlight what it thinks is the good work that it has done, in the best possible way.<\/p>\n
And as long as governments don\u2019t place full page advertisements in newspapers, highlighting their achievements by wasting taxpayer\u2019s money, I have nothing against the entire idea of the government talking about its good work. Please talk about it as much as you want to, but don\u2019t waste my taxes in the process.<\/p>\n
One of the points that Panagariya made in a column in the Business Standard<\/a> was about village electrification. The general impression is that the government has done good work on this front.<\/p>\n As he wrote: \u201c<\/span>In power, the government has already electrified 6,816 villages in the last two years compared with 5,189 villages in the three years before that<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Take a look at the following table. It gives the number of villages electrified every year, over the last decade.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n