The Government will release the complete findings of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2022-23, in about three months’ time, a top Statistics Ministry official told The Hindu. The full report will now come soon after the general elections and a tad before an ongoing survey for 2023-24 concludes.
Last Saturday, the ministry had released a brief fact sheet on the results of the survey, with official data on household consumption published after an 11-year hiatus. The sheet had included estimates of Monthly Per Capita Consumption Expenditure (MPCE) spliced across income classes, urban and rural India, States and Union Territories, with trends in the composition of such expenditure.
“The full Survey report, with unit-level data, is being assimilated and it shall be put in the public domain in three months or so… by June,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in response to a query. “And the consecutive survey that was initiated last August will be completed this July, for which we expect the results to be ready by early 2025,” the official added.
As the HCES is used for updating several macroeconomic indicators, including poverty incidence, Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Gross Domestic Product or GDP, two consecutive surveys are being undertaken to enable a choice of appropriate period for the revision of the ‘base year’ for those indicators.
“This is more important as the HCES now covers 405 items, compared to 347 in 2011-12 and we have done away with some obsolete items. There are also changes in the questionnaire and the canvassing approach, so comparability with 2011-12 needs to be done cautiously, while the 2022-23 and 2023-24 surveys will follow the same approach, enabling a better sense of consumption trends,” the official observed.
“Accounting for the time taken to compile results and work on the changes to the index, the new updated CPI series will probably take until July-August 2025 to be released,” reckoned Madhavi Arora and Harshal Patel, economists at Emkay Global Financial Services.
