The findings of the second round of Household Consumption Survey which is due to be completed this month will be available by the end of the year, according to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
The government said it is planning to release the fact sheet, or a summary of findings, by the end of the year, and a detailed report will follow in January next year. Centre had released the factsheet of the first survey conducted during 2022-23 in February this year, followed by detailed results in June.
The Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) has been designed to gather data on consumption of goods and services by the households. The data collected in HCES is also used to derive various other macroeconomic indicators.
The HCES results also form the basis of revisions in both the Consumer Price Index and the Gross Domestic Product. Moneycontrol had earlier reported that the government will take a call on both indicators by the end of the fiscal.
While the government is likely to use 2024 as the base year for CPI calculations, it is yet to take a call on how it would use the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey findings from past two years. One suggestion is to use the average weight of items from the two years (2022-23 and 2023-24), while it may also consider using only the results of 2023-24 survey for item weights.
Centre had decided to conduct two back-to-back surveys to check the validity of the results and to avoid data quality concerns like the ones that emerged during the 2017-18 survey. Subsequently, the initial 2017-18 survey had to be cancelled.
The HCES results will be key to indicate whether there have been significant divergences in consumption pattern during 2023-24, as experts had indicated that the 2022-23 results may have been marred by the trend of revenge spending after the pandemic.
The 2022-23 results found that household spending on non-food items had increased to 54 percent in rural areas and 61 percent in urban areas, when compared with 47 percent and 54 percent spent in 2011-12, respectively. The share of food items in total household expenditure has been coming down over the years.
Inequality between urban and rural household consumption had also reduced, as per the 2022-23 survey.
Besides HCES, the government will also release the results of time use survey by end of FY25. The time use survey helps determine the participation of men and women in paid and unpaid work. The last such survey was conducted in 2019, and results were made available in 2020.
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