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India’s official statistical machinery is gearing up to relaunch the All-India Household Consumer Expenditure Survey, traditionally undertaken quinquennially, from July 2022. If it fructifies, the result may be known towards the latter half of 2024, provided the Government permits the release. The last such Survey (2017-18), did not get such a sanction — its results reportedly indicated the first fall in monthly per-capita spending by households since 1972-73, with rural households facing a sharper decline compared to 2011-12. The Statistics Ministry had flagged ‘discrepancies’, ‘data quality issues’ and ‘divergences’ between estimated consumption levels and the actual output of goods and services. While it had sought to scuttle suggestions that unflattering data were being obfuscated, a better course of action would have been to release the data with caveats. It could have argued, for instance, that the numbers, at best, reflect the short-term impact of the ‘bold structural reforms’ carried out in the year preceding the Survey, to ‘formalise’ the economy — demonetisation and the GST. A fresh survey could then have been commissioned later for a clearer picture. This is what the UPA had done in 2011-12 to measure employment and consumer spending levels afresh, after the 2009-10 Surveys were affected by the global financial crisis and a severe drought that hit rural incomes.
