We seem fascinated with statistical soundbites, vacillating between the bizarre and the expedient. In October 2021, major newspapers featured stories that claimed that over 100 million Indians owned cryptocurrencies. This put Indians at the top of the global cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc. Strangely these stories exhibited no scepticism.
When Coin Crunch, a cryptocurrency news magazine, dug deeper into the source of this data, they discovered how hollow these claims were. They traced the source to data from market research, where 2,000 to 12,000 in each country were asked to complete online surveys. Generalising from Internet survey respondents to the Indian population takes quite a stretch of the imagination.
However, these outlandish statistics are not the only ones that get uncritical attention. On the release of the factsheets from the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted in 2019-20, some headlines focused on increasing Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) in India. Between 2015-16 and 2019-21, children who are too thin for their height, identified as suffering from severe wasting, called SAM, increased from 7.5% of the population to 7.7%, although stunting (low height for age) decreased from 38.4% to 35.5%. This slight increase in SAM would be a cause of concern since these children are most at risk for nutritional failure.
