By Kuldeep Singh
The annual survey of unincorporated sector enterprises (ASUSE), coupled with the periodic labour force survey (PLFS), would be extremely useful in calculating the district domestic product (DDP), Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation Secretary Saurabh Garg said on Thursday.
“These two data sets would capture the labour and enterprise sides and the activities of all household and micro and small enterprises. Large enterprises are very easily identified,” Garg said during an address at Delhi School of Economics.
He said that several states have initiated the work on calculating DDP and the ministry is working with them in this regard. “So, we’ll have a bottom up approach of calculating the DDP rather than a top-down allocation-based approach, which is what is happening right now,” he said.
The government conducts ASUSE to measure various economic and operational characteristics of unincorporated non-agricultural establishments pertaining to manufacturing, trade and other services sector.
According to experts, the estimation of DDP is more of a mechanical exercise at present with minimal district-level data. Former Acting Chairperson of the National Statistical Commission PC Mohanan pointed in a recent article that, “Proportionate allocation based on outdated population leads to near identical growth rates for the districts of a state defeating the very purpose of compiling DDP.” Mohanan argued that the alternative would be to “build estimates from the bottom and aggregate upwards.”
Garg also spoke on the challenges to and ministry’s approach about conducting the first ever National Household Income Survey, slated to begin in February. Asked about the challenge of people often being reluctant to disclose their income, Garg said, there are various ways in which these issues are taken care of. By looking at consumption, assets and a host of other indicators, conclusions could be drawn about income levels, he said.
“We are not the first one to survey income, and therefore we are learning and getting the inputs from others who are doing it already, and we are hopeful that we would be able to come to something which is credible and that can be validated,” Garg said.
The NHIS is scheduled to be launched in February 2026 and its results are expected to be available by the middle of 2027. Household income surveys are usually challenging due to respondents’ reluctance to disclose earnings from diverse sources. According to reports, attempts to conduct such information collection began in the 1950s, when the government incorporated income questions into its consumer expenditure surveys on a trial basis.
Efforts were made in the 1960s too as part of the Integrated Household Survey. These initiatives were, however, discontinued, after income estimates consistently fell short of the combined figures for consumption and savings. Further attempts made in the 1980s also failed to yield a full-scale national survey.