Planning minister MA Mannan has instructed the officials of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) to produce quality data on time and publish reports of census and surveys without any delay.

“Using modern technologies, it is possible to produce massive volumes of data instantly. Therefore, any delay in publishing reports on the pretext of data processing would not be acceptable,” he said.

The minister made the remarks while speaking as the chief guest of a conference organised by the BBS on Sunday to mark the National Statistics Day.

Dr Shamsul Alam, State minister of planning stressed on ensuring transparency, consistency, accuracy and punctuality in producing and publishing data.

The BBS along with the Statistics and Informatics Division (SID) of the planning ministry arranged several programmes to celebrate the second national statistics day with the slogan “Quality Statistics a Stair towards Better Life”.

The Planning Minister termed “fresh data” as real power and said redundant data is not useful today. So information should be available at the right time.

The State Minister asked BBS to focus on four issues – accurate data, real-time data, integration with international data, and ensuring transparency in producing and publishing data.

“Although sometimes we disagree with data regarding Bangladesh produced by globally recognised organisations, we should not disregard all their data,” he said, adding that international indicators are very important to create the image of the country in the world.

The state minister asked the BBS to take note of the information on the basis of which the indexes are published by international organisations and to minimise the gap in those indexes.

He expressed his disappointment due to delays in some major census and surveys like Population Census, Agricultural Census, Household income and Expenditure Survey.

Mohammad Tajul Islam, director general of the BBS and other officials were present at the event chaired by SID secretary Dr Shahnaz Arefin.