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【新媒体中心·四六级专栏】学英语四六级阅读篇(七十五)

2026-05-08 12:54:50

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2026· ENGLISH

Making India’s numbers count again

让印度统计数据重拾公信力

How do you know if your data are crap? You go and look at the toilets. In 2018 Rajasthan, a state in north-western India beloved by tourists, declared that it was “open defecation free”. Separately, government auditors visited dozens of villages in the state to inspect homes built under a government housing-subsidy scheme. “Interestingly”, the report notes, 49% of houses had no toilets. Despite the disclosure, data dashboards continued to show potty penetration at 100%. Interesting indeed.

如何判断一套数据是不是毫无价值的？去实地看看他们的厕所就知道了。2018年，印度西北部深受游客喜爱的拉贾斯坦邦宣布已实现“露天厕所清零”。几乎就在同一时间，政府审计部门走访了该邦数十个村庄，对政府住房补贴项目建成的民宅进行实地核查。“有意思的是”，报告中指明：49%的民宅根本没有配套厕所。可即便这份核查结果已经公之于众，官方数据平台上的厕所普及率依旧显示为100%。这可真是太“有意思”了。

It is not uncommon, anywhere in the world, for one wing of government to have no idea what another is doing. But that vignette is not petty snark from a columnist. It is contained in a recent report from Niti Aayog, the government’s own think-tank, that laments the quality of statistics in India. The risk of inaction, it said, is that “policy rides on numbers no one fully trusts.” That was just the starkest of six risks it listed.

放眼全球，不同政府部门之间不了解彼此的工作动向不是什么稀罕事。但上面这个小插曲，可不是专栏作者随口的讽刺挖苦。它出自印度政府智库——国家转型委员会（NITI Aayog）近期发布的一份报告，该报告对印度统计数据的质量感到惋惜。报告明确警示，倘若对这一乱象放任不管，最大的隐患就是“政策制定将建立在这些没人真正信得过的数据之上”。而这还只是报告列出的六大风险中，最显而易见的一项。

For decades after independence India boasted a statistical infrastructure far superior to what its level of development would suggest. But the system suffered from both neglect and political interference. Things reached a nadir in the 2010s under governments led first by a distracted and scandal-plagued Congress party and then by an inexperienced and ideological Bharatiya Janata Party. Controversies in 2018 and 2019—over GDP calculations, unemployment rates, payroll data and consumption—sapped confidence, at home and abroad, in India’s numbers.

印度独立后的数十年间，拥有一套远超自身发展水平的统计体系。不过这套体系长期疏于管理，且遭受到政治干预。2010年代整个体系的处境跌入谷底：在这期间，印度的执政政府先是组织涣散、深陷丑闻的国大党，后续上台的印度人民党政府，既缺乏执政经验，又奉行意识形态至上的执政理念。2018至2019年，围绕GDP核算、失业率、收入数据与消费数据接连爆发了多起争议，印度国内外对该国统计数据的信任也随之彻底崩塌。

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