New Delhi: The results of Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CES) for 2022-23 and 2023-24 are likely to come only after the 2024 general elections, according to The Indian Express.

While the ongoing 2022-23 survey is expected to conclude by the end of July this year, the results should be available by December. However, officials in the know of things indicate that they are not sure if the results would be made public immediately.

The reason for withholding the results of the 2022-23 survey is to release them together with the 2023-24 survey results. The 2023-24 survey will begin after the conclusion of the first survey (2022-23) by the end of July and may well go into the middle of next year.

Officials say the reason for releasing two sets of results at once is to see "stability in results" since the last comparative CES results available are a decade old (68th Round for July 2011 to June 2012).

Although the government did carry out a similar exercise in 2017-18, it withheld the results citing "quality issues". However, leaked results from the 2017-18 survey indicated a rise in poverty levels, which many believe as the reason for the government to withhold results. The surveys are meant to be conducted every five years to gather specific details about income and spending patterns in rural and urban households. These surveys, in turn, generate estimates of 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. The CES will cover around 1.2 lakh households in rural areas and around 84,000 households in urban areas.

After the last survey in 2017-18, officials have reworked the survey to include more granular information about consumption baskets. The basket itself has been expanded in the new rounds. Due to the change in the survey method, the 2022-23 and 2023-24 surveys are now being referred to as "revamped surveys" to distinguish them from old surveys and methods of data collection.

Over the period of two back-to-back surveys (2022-23 and 2023-24), enumerators will visit households three times to avoid a "potential consistency problem".

"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," said an official told The Indian Express, explaining the reason for back-to-back surveys.

Continuing further, the official said, "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."

Officials also say the results this time around would come in faster by four to five months in comparison to previous surveys. "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," the official said.

These surveys – which are designed to obtain details pertaining to expenditure on the consumption of goods and services (food and non-food) consumed by households – would also be used for rebasing the Gross Domestic Product and other macroeconomic indicators such as retail inflation based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Subsequently, for rebasing the CPI from the existing base of 2012, a market survey has to be carried out after the CES, which will help determine the consumption basket. "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 added.

Meanwhile, experts The Indian Express spoke to indicated problems with the revamped CES surveys. The new approaches being adopted in the surveys, according to them, would increase working time and the possibility of overestimating consumption. They also feel data collection, items and methodology may make the results incomparable with previous consumer expenditure surveys, because new poverty estimates will have to be drawn up as they would not be consistent with the previous ones.

In 2019, senior government statisticians P.C. Mohanan and J. Meenakshi had said that the government had withheld unemployment data for release till after the polls. Both had resigned from the government-funded National Statistical Commission, that checks the quality of India’s official data, in protest.

"Data should be released as per the calendar, whether it is to your liking or not liking," Mohanan had told Reuters then. "Otherwise, where is credibility in the system?"

Some of the withheld data was eventually leaked to the Business Standard. It had revealed that unemployment in June 2018 had been at the highest level in 45 years.

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