August 5, 2022
Jawhar Sircar’s Special Mention on the Union government’s withholding data of the consumer expenditure survey for the last 10 years
Sir, I wish to draw the attention of the Chair and the Council to the fact that the Government has not released
any new household Consumer Expenditure Survey for the last ten years. As we all realize, there can be no worthwhile official data for estimating poverty and ratios based on consumption and, as a result, it is extremely difficult to do proper planning for targeting Government welfare schemes. The Government has cited that there were data quality issues in the 2017-18 Survey that stopped it from releasing the entire data set but till date we have not been enlightened on what exactly these issues are. Economists, planners and administrators feel that if the CES is
conducted every year or every alternative year, instead of having it in every five years, it would benefit the nation in assessing incomes, expenditure and the really needy strata. In any case, the Government is advised to realize the gravity of the meaningful data and pay more attention to the Consumer Expenditure Survey data that it has not been releasing for ten years and more. I urge the Government to release the said data immediately.
