## COUNTING SMARTER

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [COUNTING SMARTER](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/12/garg.pdf)

## Other formats

- [Markdown version](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/12/garg.pdf.md)
- [Structured JSON version](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/12/garg.pdf.json)

---

### Overview
- India’s national statistical system serves a population of over 1.4 billion.
- Central-level staffing: some 5,000 full-time staff members.
- Field operations staffing: over 6,000 field investigators and supervisors during major survey operations.
- Administrative geography noted: 28 states and 8 territories.

### Technology and data collection
- Primary data collection remains door-to-door for households and businesses, but is tablet based.
- Tablet features and backend:
  - Plans to add AI chatbots on tablets to provide immediate responses to surveyor questions.
  - All tablet data uploaded directly to a background portal called e-SIGMA to facilitate data processing.
- User access and dissemination:
  - Website made more intuitive and a mobile app launched.
  - More infographics and direct data download capability.
  - Training videos developed to teach researchers, students, policymakers, and other stakeholders how to access unit-level data.

### Incorporating alternative and high-frequency data
- Official statistics remain underpinned by rigorous scientific methods, comprehensive quality control, and international comparability.
- The ministry is exploring incorporation of:
  - e-commerce, scanner, mobile, satellite, and other alternative data into official statistics.
- Rationale: alternative data provide supplementary, high-frequency insights from different perspectives while official statistics provide credibility and comparability.

### Resources and human capital
- Financial resources:
  - The ministry reports no budget constraint and describes work as human- rather than finance-intensive.
  - Once IT infrastructure is in place, maintenance and operational costs are manageable.
- Human resources are organized in three levels:
  - Top: Indian Statistical Service officers drawn from India’s finest institutions.
  - Middle: supervisors at the ground level, many trained in statistics or mathematics.
  - Base: enumerators who conduct door-to-door surveys and receive intensive training.
- Skill-building:
  - Encouragement for officers to use the government-wide Karmayogi platform to build skills including communication.

### Labor statistics — frequency, scope, and sample
- Until last year, an annual labor force survey with quarterly updates covered only urban India.
- Since January 2025:
  - A monthly report is produced for both the urban and rural sectors.
  - A quarterly report provides more detailed information on sectors and types of employment.
  - Sample size has been nearly doubled, increasing data granularity.
  - New survey questions introduced on employment status, education, training and skill levels, and where respondents graduated or received certification.

### Harmonization, metadata, and interoperability
- Efforts to harmonize data across agencies include:
  - Making data from other ministries and departments machine readable for collation, combination, and comparison.
  - A registry of all government data sets, accounting for different levels of importance.
  - A national metadata structure shared with all ministries.
  - Alignment with international systems of classification and national classifications; ensuring use of internationally recognized definitions to support comparability.
  - Use of unique identifiers for organizations and geographic locations, with each agency required to use its own identifier to ensure datasets can be read by each other.
  - Introduction of methods for reconciling discrepancies between administrative data sets.

### SNA 2025, rebasing, and expenditure data
- The United Nations revised System of National Accounts (SNA) (referred to as SNA 2025).
- India is in the process of rebasing national accounts and incorporating changes required by SNA 2025 into rebased methodology and new guidelines expected to be released over the next couple of years.
- Sectoral accounts have been published annually in recent years; examples mentioned for the current year include forest and water accounts.
- Production- and expenditure-side data:
  - Production-side data described as extremely robust.
  - When the last rebasing occurred about a decade ago, GST data were not available; GST [goods and services tax] data are now available and will provide more granular expenditure-side estimates in the rebased GDP.
  - A robust production-side data set will be accompanied by an equally robust consumption-side data set to improve overall accounts accuracy.

### Key challenges identified
- Granularity and sample size:
  - Need for data at district, subdistrict, and village levels requires increasing sample sizes, which increases margins of error and raises manpower and financing needs.
- Frequency and timeliness:
  - Users are unwilling to wait a year, and even a month is often considered too long; reducing time lag between data collection and dissemination is a core challenge.
- Cooperation and privacy:
  - Ensuring continued cooperation from people and organizations to provide data amid privacy concerns in the social media age, while maintaining credibility and verifiability.
- Integrity and trust:
  - India adopted the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics in 2016, which emphasize professional independence and accountability.
  - Practices to preserve integrity include regular stakeholder consultations, conferences to improve user understanding, and publication of detailed documentation for large-sample surveys to allow independent scrutiny.

*Source: Interview with Saurabh Garg, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, F&D, December 2025.*

---


_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/12/garg.pdf_