Populist governments and their disregard for expertise

Just as the Trump government has a solid reputation for disdain of expert advice on topics ranging from environmental issues to trade and international treaties, it seems that the populist government in India likes to tell its followers what it wants to hear.  See this (pretty angry) article at Foreign Policy, mainly about India's terrible air pollution, but also other topics:

Speaking from the headquarters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on May 9, the cabinet member Nitin Gadkari promised a rapid elimination of air pollution. “Delhi will be free of air and water pollution in the next three years,” he said. Gadkari is now the minister of road transport and highways now, but in the years before Modi first became prime minister in 2014, Gadkari was president of the BJP. He said he expected that the air would clear because of the achievements of his political party, which “has done 100 percent corruption-free, transparent, time-bound, result-oriented, and quality work.”

Bringing air pollution down to acceptable levels—not just in New Delhi, but also throughout north India—would indeed be a tremendous accomplishment. But promising to do so within three years is absurd. China, for example, has successfully directed policymaking efforts toward reducing particle pollution, after decades of catastrophic pollution in the north and public pressure once air quality data became easily available online To do so has taken China several years (more than three), has certainly not eliminated pollution altogether, and has required facing unpleasant facts. Central Chinese officials held local governments to account for improving pollution—and moved to address the problem when statistical analysis showed that local bureaucrats were manipulating the numbers. But Gadkari’s unbelievable numbers are coming from the top.

Such absurdities have become commonplace. Gadkari’s promise echoes Modi’s claim the government could eliminate open defecation from rural India by 2019. (Open defecation rates improved, but it remains dangerously common, as independent demographic data shows.) Both numerical deadlines combine wild ambition and a good cause with needless quantitative precession and the absence of any plan that could achieve the result. 

And more about the general attitude of "we know better than experts":

 Unfortunately, the pattern extends beyond the environment. Increasingly, many of India’s leading economists and statisticians have spoken out about the dismantling of India’s systems of official statistics and expertise. Respected statisticians—including an economist whom I know personally from my time at the Delhi School of Economics—resigned from the National Statistical Commission in January, in protest of the government’s refusal to release credible unemployment data.

The government’s top economic advisors and policymakers report being as surprised as everyone else when in 2016 the prime minister, in a move remembered as “demonetization,” suddenly declared that a large fraction of India’s notes no longer counted as currency. In my own field of child health, the Economist reported that UNICEF suppressed data on child stunting because the prime minister’s home state scored poorly. I do not think any of my colleagues in sanitation research seriously believe the government’s response to a December 2018 parliamentary question, which was to insist that sanitation coverage in rural Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh is 100 percent.