RESULTS of the revamped Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CES) for 2022-23 and for 2023-24, meant to reveal more granular details of income and spending patterns in rural and urban households, may now come well after the 2024 general elections, The Indian Express has learnt. Although the results of the first survey for 2022-23, which will end in July, are likely to come through by December this year, officials involved in the exercise indicated that it has not yet been decided if these will be released immediately. The second of the two revamped Surveys, for 2023-24, is set to be launched in July this year and a decision on releasing the results of these two Surveys together would mean that it would be pushed back to well beyond the summer of 2024. Result: the revamped surveys involve three visits to a household and two back-to-back surveys are being conducted to see “stability in results”, as the last comparative CES is more than a decade old (68th Round for July 2011 to June 2012). The government had junked the 2017-18 CES – the survey is held every five years - citing “quality issues”. Studies based on leaked findings of that survey had pointed to a rise in poverty levels in 2017-18. The CES will cover around 1.2 lakh households in rural areas and around 84,000 households in urban areas. “It (the first Survey) was launched last August. The next one will be launched in July. We want to be able to ensure that the responses are consistent…it was felt that two surveys should be done so that we can compare the stability of the estimates and how reliable they are. Otherwise, you have to just take it at face value,” an official involved in the exercise said. The revamped CES includes new features such as three visits by an enumerator to a household to seek more detailed information on their consumption basket. The basket itself has been expanded in the new round. The largest category of “miscellaneous” items has been segregated for detailed collection of data on consumption of those items, along with inclusion of items that have seen higher consumption trends in recent times. Also, questions for seeking inputs on welfare subsidies such as food grains are learnt to have been included. The three visits to a household to collect data on consumption expenditure will entail seeking information on daily-use items, regular items and consumer durables and will help draw poverty estimates after a decade-long gap. “The main reason was that since it is a completely new approach and you are visiting a household three times, instead of one visit earlier, there’s a potential consistency problem because the person would have forgotten what he/she would have told last time, so the best way to do it is to do it twice and see whether the system is stable. Earlier, it was one visit per household and the full questionnaire would be asked, which would take 2.5-3 hours. Now, no visit is more than 45 minutes long, so that fatigue will get reduced and hopefully the recall will be better,” the official said. Since these CES rounds are being done using a handheld device, the results are expected to come in faster by nearly 4-5 months. “We should have results for 2022-23 by the end of 2023 and the next one will be by the end of 2024. Then we will see if we feel comfortable or uncomfortable with the results. We don’t know how it is going to work. It has not been finalised yet if the results for one year will be made public or not immediately,” an official said. Queries sent to the National Statistical Office and Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation by The Indian Express went unanswered. The CES aims at generating estimates of household Monthly Per Capita Consumer Expenditure (MPCE) and the distribution of households and persons over the MPCE range separately for rural and urban sectors across the country and for different socio-economic groups. It is designed to collect information regarding expenditure on consumption of goods and services (food and non-food) consumed by households. The results are then also used for rebasing of the GDP and other macroeconomic indicators such as retail inflation based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). For rebasing of the CPI from the current base of 2012, a market survey is required to be conducted after the CES, based on which then the consumption basket gets determined. “Market survey will be done after that. If we don’t have confidence in the estimates, then we can’t use it for market survey,” the official said. Experts pointed out that the issues arising out of the revamped procedure would include an increase in working time and a possibility of overestimating consumption. Also, the changes in data collection, items and methodology may make the results incomparable with previous consumer expenditure surveys and new poverty estimates will have to be drawn since they won’t be consistent with earlier ones, they said.
