The Ministry of Truth, Part 1: How the Prime Minister’s Office has ordered a systemic operation to discredit and ‘fix’ global rankings which show the government in bad light. And, to home-cook some charitable replacements.
New Delhi: In Hyderabad’s Taj Deccan last year, Smriti Irani, then India’s Women and Child Development Minister, took the stage to talk about the future role of women. Soon, she was firing off a mix of sharp humour and calculated outrage in defence of the Modi government. The provocation was a question on India’s dismal 111th ranking in the 2023 Global Hunger Index, a measure of undernourishment among 125 countries that had just been released.
“People say the index is hogwash,” she declared by equating her fleeting inconvenience of missed meals due to busy schedules to the undernutrition, hunger and poverty that the metrics measured.
“I left my house in Delhi in the morning at 4 today. I caught a flight at 5 to go to Kochi. I did a conclave there, caught a flight at 5 o’clock to come to this programme. By the time I get to anything called food, it will be 10 o’clock. If you called me anytime in the day today and asked from Gallup (the survey agency) are you hungry, I’ll say ‘Oh yes, I am.” While bristling at the ratings, what the minister didn’t reveal was that her ministry had over the past year made multiple attempts at lobbying with the publishers of the Global Hunger Index to bump up India’s ranking.
The government wanted the publishers to make critical changes to how they score the countries. One of them was to focus less on malnutrition among children, an indicator where India performed poorly – even by the government’s own admission – and dragged down its overall score. The government thought the hunger index was too “biased” towards children and even argued that a large number of infant deaths aren’t actually tied to malnutrition.
This was not an isolated attempt at influencing a global index. The Reporters’ Collective investigation has revealed that it is part of a “whole-of-government approach” devised by the Prime Minister’s Office to closely monitor 30 global indices and reach out to agencies that publish the indices to convince them to change their parameters – what they measure – if India is doing badly in their reports, which it often does.
To exclusively track these indices, a nodal unit named “Global Indices for Reform and Growth” (GIRG) has been set up. It functions as a perception management agency, complete with a media outreach cell, to manage how India is being talked about and present a rosier picture. Documents reviewed by The Collective show at least 19 Union ministries and departments have been tasked to closely monitor what these global indices are saying about India – from the level of hunger in the country, health and education, press freedom to the state of democracy.
The Indian missions abroad too, have been roped in to speak to the publishers of the indices and report back to the government. The Modi government aims to ultimately create its own indices. It is the easiest way for the government to run down these global indices with which it often has had a problem over the methodology employed.
To achieve all this, the government roped in a Gujarat-based IT firm, which previously made news for offering “online reputation management services” to the BJP, to create a full-fledged indices tracking software. The company had come under fire from Facebook in 2019 for “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate” in favour of the BJP.
Internally, officials have been candid about why the government wants control over indices: “national governments (would) have complete ownership over this measure.” The government behind closed doors has bluntly admitted that the focus is on bumping up India’s ranking. Senior officials, on record, have even asked ministries to “suggest their own parameters” for “showcasing India’s ranking on global indices is improving”.
Some criticisms by the Indian government of the biases in global indices, especially against countries in the global south, are valid and are echoed by independent experts. But how the government chooses to respond to its rankings in these indices reveals its priority. The focus is on massaging the data to make India look better at any cost possible rather than fixing the underlying problems.
Ranking the world
Global indices measure how well a country is doing in important areas. These areas can include government performance, social and economic development, or health and education. Agencies choose the parameters that best show the results for each area….
https://www.reporters-collective.in/trc/inside-modi-govts-war-room-to-whitewash-global-indices
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After the truth-shower 