The Government of India has kicked off the process for conducting the quinquennial Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) in July 2022.
This year the questionnaire for the survey has been tweaked to capture data on items received free from the government’s welfare programmes.
Field work, which will for the first time involve three visits over a year to assess spending patterns in selected households, will begin soon, Rao Inderjit Singh, the Minister of State with independent charge of Statistics and Programme Implementation told the Lok Sabha.
Conducted every five years by the National Statistical Office (NSO), the HCES is used to arrive at estimates of poverty levels as well as review key economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The results of the survey are also utilised for updating the consumption basket and for base revision of the Consumer Price Index.
The survey was last conducted in 2017-18 but its findings were not published, citing data quality concerns, so the last publicly available official estimates on consumer spending are from 2011-12.
