If there is so much data available, why can’t you make claims about the number of people killed by security forces during the Punjab counterinsurgency campaign?
While there are a number of different sources that have collected information about the number of people killed by security forces in Punjab, each one of these sources, or data sets, alone is incomplete and therefore inaccurate. In order to make scientifically defensible estimates of the number of people killed, we need to apply the demographic technique of multiple systems estimation to the available data. This scientific estimation method is used widely in adjusting for undercount in population censuses. In epidemiology, multiple systems estimation (MSE) is used for estimating the incidence of rare diseases from multiple registration lists of diseased people. More recently, multiple systems estimation has been used in large-scale human rights projects to estimate the magnitude of conflict-related mortality. Multiple systems estimation uses multiple data sets to estimate the size of a population being measured, by modeling the probability that different types of documented individuals
