NEW DELHI: The government has begun a mammoth exercise to overhaul the system of collecting key statistics on inflation , industrial production, consumption and employment to restore the credibility of official economic data, which took a severe beating after a new series of national accounts was released last year.In a wholesale clean-up attempt, five committees have been set up to review data for GDP estimates, provide for mechanisms to ensure “data integrity” and come up with industry-wise and geography-wise disaggregated data – something that is not available in the current system.The committee on financial sector statistics is headed by Ravindra Dholakia , a member of the newly constituted Monetary Policy Committee.“These committees are expected to cover the requirement of statistics for estimation of GDP, data governance for quality, timelines and credibility of collected data and derived estimates, provide for data integrity and audit trials of a National Statistical System,” the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation said in a directive.The exercise, according to National Statistical Commission Chairman RB Barman, will make monitoring the performance evaluation of data more effective.“The enhanced transparency that will be available will go a long way for re-ensuring the credibility of the National Statistical System. A focused attention on district-level statistics will also serve the needs of the Human Development Index,” he said.Through the committees, which are chaired by experts from various institutes, the commission also wants to put the fiscal statistics of the government – expenditure and revenue – in a centralised repository.The committees have been set up when the statistics office is struggling with persistent doubts about the new series of national accounts that had puzzled even Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian and former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan The new series of national accounts, which changed the methodology of estimating output from the internationally followed factor cost to market prices, bumped up growth for FY14 to 6.9% from 5% estimated under the earlier methodology.The new series continues to be questioned even now for the over 7% growth being out of sync with industrial production, among other indicators.The Index of Industrial Production reported a 2.4% expansion in FY16, while GDP grew 7.6%, inviting many questions.The statistics office is also preparing the back-series data from FY05 to FY12 with the revised base of 2011-12 to explain this sharp upward revision in growth, as previous explanations have not satisfied doubts.The Ravindra Dholakia committee is entrusted with the responsibility of reviewing the existing system of data collection and suggest measures for an integrated system to capture granular data and a mechanism to provide estimates at the state level.The panel on online reporting system is supposed to review data collection methods for core statistics, including inflation and industrial production, and has been delegated the task of recommending measures for automated online collection of such data for “improving quality and timelines.”Data-collecting agencies of the government such as the Central Statistics Office, National Sample Survey Office and Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics, too, have been covered.The group on analytics will review their existing systems of data collection, collation and dissemination and survey the best practices for the repository of the National Statistical System.Barman explained that data on the government and the corporate sector, which cover more than half of the GDP, can be collected and validated online. Similarly, data on household sector and non-profit institutions, which is collected by way of sample surveys, can be scrutinised using advanced processing systems.