Government of India to spend 6500 million on strengthening statistics

New Delhi, Mar 22 : The Union Government on Monday approved a new centrally sponsored scheme --"India Statistical Strengthening Project(ISSP)" to strengthen the capacity and operations of the Indian Statistical Systems.

The scheme was formulated by the Union Statistics and Programme Implementation Ministry.

The Centre approved a total estimated cost of Rs. 6504.3 million under the scheme.

The Project would be funded through 80 percent World Bank loan and 20 percent of the project would be borne by the Centre.

The funds will be made available to the participating States or Union Territory in a phased manner.

Till date, twenty two States and Union Territories have communicated their decision to participate in the project and, it is expected that, in due course, the remaining States and Union Territories would also be participating in the ISSP.

The objective of the ISSP is to strengthen the capacity and operations of the Indian Statistical Systems of the participating States and Union Territories and substantially improve the coverage, timeliness and quality of official statistics generated by them.

This will help both in improved compilation of national level socio-economic statistics and indicators based thereon and in improving the execution of State-level planning and policy formulation tasks.