This will be for the record first time that the industry survey results will be available to public in a such a short period. An average time-lag for preparing and final presentation of the data has ranged between three-four years till now.

The move comes in the wake of the demand by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for a early and precise collation of data from various sectors in order to correctly assess and analyse the performance of the economy.

The government has also taken a decision to usher in more transparency in the performance of central and state departments and ministries as well as cut-down on the excessive time-lag in bringing out essential data, as declared in the national agenda for governance.

"We have developed a specialsampling design for this purpose and a common software package was developed by the information services wing of the CSO, Calcutta,'' said sources in the planning ministry, department of statistics.The department of statistics had initiated the survey work by the first week of September, sources said. The exercise started with the field staff of the field operations division of the National Sample Survey Organisation.

According to sources, the exercise is to be completed by the end of the coming month. This will be mainly done through the industrial statistics wing of the CSO, Calcutta.

The statistics department had conducted special training workshops for this purpose during July-August, where the field staff as well as well as the technical personnel of field operations division of the National Sample Survey Organisation were present.

Apart from them, the workshops also conducted a special interaction between state government representatives, who were present in the context of the rationalisation workof the industries survey for 1997-98.

IMF and World Bank officials have been saying that with the huge gap between the time of occurrence and final presentation, normally ranging between three to five years and sometimes even more, renders the entire process of assessing the performance of any sector meaningless.