WEALTH and child welfare are sensitive topics in India. As the country has grown richer in the past couple of decades, Indians’ health has improved only slowly. The story has varied widely from state to state. Governments of southern ones like Kerala and Tamil Nadu do a lot to help women and children; health indicators there show steady gains. In the north and west, even in better-off states, nutrition, prenatal care, school attendance and other measures of childhood well-being are worse than in the south. A much-debated case study is the western state of Gujarat, where Narendra Modi was chief minister for a dozen years before becoming prime minister. Calling his state a model, he boasted that incomes there were among India’s highest. He dismissed critics who said he was neglecting health and social policy—once explaining how Gujarati women suffer high levels of malnourishment because they are “beauty-conscious” and refuse to eat.

India has not published comprehensive figures on nutrition or health since a national assessment in 2007. However, a countrywide survey involving 200,000 interviews was conducted in 2013 and 2014 by Unicef, the UN agency for children, and the Indian government. The results should have been published in October 2014. A limited set of data, on immunisation, was released that month by the ministry of health. It covered most large states, but figures on Gujarat, oddly, were excluded.

Unicef and India’s government have still not published the full report. Unicef did release a 72-page study on global child welfare on June 23rd, warning that millions of children would suffer because of some countries’ failure to meet development goals. In it Unicef spells out the benefits of publishing survey data. One is that it helps “citizens to hold their governments to account”. Ironically, Unicef itself did not use its best data from India in the report, relying instead on figures a decade old. Unicef officials blamed the government for the delay, suggesting the accuracy of the data was under review; various Indian officials declined to comment. It seems possible that data were held back for political reasons, to avoid embarrassing Mr Modi.