A long-term perspective on collecting Indian agricultural statistics: reviewing the purposes, methods, and implications for Indian development policy

Abstract This article adopts a long-term perspective to examine Indian agricultural data: from crop yields for estimating food output, the examination of food prices and wages for calculating income and living standards, to the status of food consumption to ascertain hunger and malnutrition. The focus will be on the evaluation of how the new statistical data collection methods that emerged in the early decades of twentieth century have impacted the field of development economics in India. It makes the case that the emergence of survey methods data that were initially created by officials and later on by professionals employed in institutions in India were novel and began to gain attention in the international sphere. It proceeds to underline the importance of these statistical databases for identifying the minimum standard of living to escape poverty as an important measure for ascertaining how national development strategy could reduce poverty and hunger and also shows that these databases proved to be a core resource for unpicking recent puzzles regarding food and nutrition levels among the poorer sections of society. Additionally, the article engages with more recent estimation methods where survey-based agricultural statistical databases have been incorporated in multi-scalar indices alongside meteorological and ecological data to create more informative agricultural databases to advance the objective of sustainable agricultural development in India.