Abstract
IN a paper on “India's Trade and Industrial Statistics”, read before the Royal Statistical Society on March 20, Sir H. A. F. Lindsay, the Government of India Trade Commissioner, in London, pointed out that progress in the compilation and preparation of official statistics in India has been from depart mental to expert control. In 1871, when Sir William Hunter was appointed as the first Director-General of Statistics, the local authorities submitted their statistics to the appropriate Government depart ment, which was responsible for tabulating and publishing them. Afterwards, expert control was gradually introduced, and now the Director-General is directly responsible for compilation and review. A new series of monthly statistics recently introduced relates to the output of the more important Indian industries and includes jute manufacture, paper, cement, matches, sugar, iron and steel, kerosenei, petrol, sulphuric acid and sulphate of ammonia. In addition, cotton spinning and weaving statistics have been collected and published for many years past. The main difficulty has been to obtain statistics of the output of the numerous cottage industries which exist alongside modern large-scale factories, sometimes in active competition with these factories and sometimes catering for quite a different class of consumer. The Indian factory, however, provides a useful unit for the collection, compilation and publication of statistics of industrial output, and India has made a good start in this direction. There are many countries of no little industrial importance which have not yet made comparable efforts in the sphere of industrial statistics.
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Statistics in India. Nature 133, 489 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133489a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133489a0