The Centre has blamed the States for a prolonged delay in releasing the findings of the Seventh Economic Census, a critical compendium of formal and informal non-farm enterprises operating across the country, in a submission to the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance.
The committee, chaired by BJP MP Jayant Sinha, has rapped the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation for the second time in five months over ‘a growing delay’ in releasing the findings of Economic Census (EC), carried out between 2019 and 2021, rendering some of the data ‘outdated’.
Responding to a recommendation made by the committee in March to ‘release the EC without any further delay lest the data becomes infructuous’, the Ministry has attributed its inaction to the lack of requisite nods from States and Union Territories (UTs) for the provisional results.
