An academic network has asked the Union health ministry to reinstate the suspended director of an institute involved in nationwide health surveys, saying
its suspension order seems to be related to survey findings that have challenged some of the Centre’s official narratives.

Last week, the health ministry suspended K.S. James, director of the International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, after a fact-finding committee set up by the ministry had found irregularities in 11 of 35 complaints relating to appointments, recruitment and compliance with a reservation roster in the IIPS.

But the India Academic Freedom Network (IAFN) has asked Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya to withdraw the suspension, saying James is a demographer and scholar of the highest global repute with “impeccable personal and academic integrity”.

The IIPS, an institute under the health ministry, conducts periodic National Family Health Surveys (NFHS). The latest NFHS 2019-21 had thrown up findings relating to open defecation that sections of public health experts say had challenged certain claims made by the Centre and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“We believe that in suspending Professor James,... the government is trying to make him a scapegoat for findings from the NFHS which question the official narrative on some issues and for which he is neither directly nor indirectly responsible,” the IAFN said in a letter to Mandaviya.

“This act places India in the ranks of those countries which do not allow independent surveys to raise questions on government narratives,” said the letter signed by more than 800 academics, researchers and scholars.

The suspension, the IAFN said, will also create “serious suspicion, both nationally and internationally”, on the reliability of the next round of the NFHS currently underway. The NFHS typically covers over 6,00,000 households across the country to collect data on health and living conditions.

“Independent research and data gathering is crucial to good policymaking. We
do not want India’s performance to be questioned internationally because the data
it puts out is treated as questionable,” the IAFN said,
calling for immediate withdrawal of the suspension order.

The signatories to the IAFN letter include faculty and research scholars of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and public health experts associated with the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan and the Forum for Medical Ethics.

James’s suspension, although asserted by the health ministry as linked to administrative irregularities, has triggered speculation in public health circles whether the NFHS data on open defecation or other findings of the survey might have displeased the Centre.

The NFHS 2019-21 survey found that 83 per cent of
over 6,36,000 households sampled across the country had access to a toilet, while 19 per cent had no facility, implying that members of these households practised open defecation.

The Modi government launched the Swachh Bharat (clean India) Mission in October 2014 to eliminate open defecation. At a public event on October 2, 2019, five years after the mission’s launch, Modi claimed that the number of people practising open defecation had fallen from 600 million to “negligible” through an intensive behaviour change programme under the mission.

A faculty member at the IIPS, who requested not to be named, said he was
not aware of any dispute between the government and the IIPS director on the NFHS findings.