The government is preparing to track the informal sector more frequently, with quarterly surveys to capture capital spends, employment planned to improve compilation of the gross domestic product (GDP).
At present, the informal economy, which operates outside of formal regulations and largely involves small-scale and labour-intensive operations, is measured through estimates from high-frequency indicators and is pegged to the performance of the formal sector.
"For the large informal sector in India, the estimates are dependent on various survey results. Attempts are being made to reduce the periodicity of the surveys like Periodic Labour Force Survey, which is now available monthly; annual survey of unincorporated sector enterprises (ASUSE) are being planned to be released quarterly,” Rao Inderjit Singh, minister of state (independent charge) for statistics and programme implementation, told Moneycontrol.
The actual situation of informal sector is only available after a year of the first release of the GDP data. If ASUSE is conducted quarterly, the first advance estimates released in January, followed by second advance and preliminary estimates will also reflect the informal sector picture more accurately.
The ministry has reduced the timeline for the release of data, with quarterly numbers to be released after 45 days from completion.
The ASUSE is, at present, conducted yearly and captures the data of non-agriculture informal sector.
The latest ASUSE survey (2023-24) was conducted between October 2023 and September 2024.
The decision to increase the periodicity of ASUSE, follows from government tracking the unemployment data every month.
The ministry is working on improving its key macro-economic data estimation process.
"A pilot has been done on the Annual Survey of Service Sector Enterprises (ASSSE). In addition, the use of GST data, E-Vahan portal, UPI transaction data from NPCI, etc, is also being attempted. With the availability of more datasets, GDP base revision could be done more frequently in the near future," Singh said.
The ministry is also gearing up to release an updated, GDP, CPI and IIP series from 2026 — a long awaited revision and the first since 2011-12.
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