India is gearing up for its eighth economic census, employing technology for data collection, while addressing data quality concerns from the delayed seventh census. The government is integrating AI into statistical systems and revising the GDP ba...
New Delhi: The government has begun preparations for the eighth economic census, with committees being formed at both state and district levels.
The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) is in the process of seeking necessary approvals for undertaking this exercise that will capture data of all establishments and entrepreneurial units in India.
"This economic census will be more technology driven, with work ongoing on an end-to-end digital solution for data generation," MoSPI secretary Saurabh Garg told ET.
The results of the seventh economic census, which was launched in 2019 but completed in 2021 due to delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, are yet to be released over concerns about data quality.
In December 2023, statistics minister Rao Inderjit Singh informed Parliament that 12 states/union territories had not approved the provisional results of the seventh economic census, while decisions were pending in 10 others.
According to the sixth economic census, conducted from January 2013 to April 2014, India had 58.5 million enterprises employing 131 million people. Those results were published in 2016.
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AI Key
The ministry is working to integrate artificial intelligence into the official statistical system.
MoSPI in collaboration with a startup has launched a pilot project to develop an AI-based tool for extracting legacy data and a chat bot for intelligent document search. The aim is to ensure ease of access and management, people in the know told ET.
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Other initiatives include the development of an AI/machine learning-based classification tool for the National Industrial Classification codes, a vision language model for optimising resource deployment for the urban frame survey and AI/ML-based classification of scanner data on individual consumption by purpose.
India joined the United Nations Committee of Experts on Big Data in January 2025 to explore challenges and opportunities of big data. In July 2024, the ministry established a Data Innovation Lab to integrate emerging technologies into official statistics in association with research institutions, startups and academia.
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New GDP series
Parallelly, the ministry is undertaking a base year revision of key economic indicators, including gross domestic product, the consumer price index and the index of industrial production.
The GDP base year is being moved to 2022-23 from 2011-12.
Apart from using goods and services tax data in the new GDP series, the use of data from the Public Finance Management System, Vahan portal and the Unified Payments Interface is also being explored, said Garg.
This was first reported by ET in December 2024.
The revised methodology will expand the double deflation technique to sectors like rail transport, mining and electricity. Double deflation is used for measuring the real value added at constant prices.
Meanwhile, volume extrapolation techniques, which are used for predicting future values of a variable, will be used in other sectors to derive real estimates.
Focus on sub-state level data
To enhance granularity, the National Statistical Office has revised its survey sampling design to treat districts as a basic stratum for all the surveys, starting January 2025. This will facilitate district-level data collection for various indicators like employment under the Periodic Labour Force Survey and enterprise activity under the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Enterprises. The ministry is also providing technical and financial assistance to states/UTs for generation of indicators such as GDP and inflation at the district level. At present, 23 states compile district-level GDP estimates.
