GUWAHATI: The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) has partnered with Common Services Centres Special Purpose Vehicle (CSC-SPV) under the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology to conduct the 7th Economic Census of India that will provide insight into all economic activities and ownership patterns of businesses across the country.
For the 7th Economic Census, MoSPI has decided to use mobile phone apps for conducting the same, which will speed up the process of data collection and analysis. IT-based digital platforms will be used by the ministry for the purpose of data capture, validation, report generation and dissemination.
"The 7th Economic Census will be done using a mobile application. There will be two rounds of supervision to ensure quality of the census," a CSC official said.
Further, the upcoming Census 2019 will include geo-tagged data of business enterprises to ensure that no bogus enterprises are included in the official statistics. The move comes even as the government is facing questions over its national income numbers and growth estimates.
Field officials conducting the survey will include live locations of the enterprises via their mobile phones which will help clean the database organically. The geo-tagging is expected to help weed out the shell companies and thereby improve data quality.
There will be two rounds of supervision to ensure quality of the census. At the first stage, there will be a physical check and geo-tagging of all enterprises by the officers of Common Service Centres, the access points for delivering government e-services in rural and remote areas. This would be followed by a sampling check in which government’s field officers will randomly verify the location of the enterprise.
"We have proposed to start the survey fieldwork from June 1 and the field work will be finished in 3 months only from the date of commencement and simultaneously results will be out in a phased manner. Nine lakh enumerators and 3 lakh supervisors will be involved in performing the survey," the official added.
The Economic Census comes with massive job opportunities for the lakhs of people who shall be hired for a period of three months.
The works for the census will continue for three months and for this, three lakh village level entrepreneurs (VLE), already working for CSC, will play the crucial role of supervisors, and 9 lakh enumerators will do house-to-house survey under their supervision.
The enumerators will be paid as per their work and for the survey of one housing unit they will receive Rs 10. If that housing unit is happens to be commercial, the payment will be Rs 16. However, for surveying one commercial unit the payment is Rs 20. It is estimated that one person can survey about 20-25 units in a day.
State level training exercise held in city
In the run-up to the 7th Economic Census, a state-level training workshop of master trainers was organised by the CSC-SPV in Guwahati on May 28.
The objective was to impart training to master trainers (enumerators and supervisors) engaged in the 7th Economic Census (7th EC). The participants were trained on the key concepts and definitions, processes, digital platform and application to be used for the enumeration (data capture and supervision) in the field.
Following the state-level workshop, the training will spread across the state with district-level workshops. The fieldwork for the 7th Economic Census will commence in June 2019 and the results of the exercise will be made available after verification and validation of the field work. A total of 15,000 supervisors and enumerators of CSC-SPV will be involved in the survey in the state.
An official spokesman said that the 7th Economic Census 2019 is being conducted by Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to provide disaggregated information on various operational and structural aspects of all establishments in the country.
Over 6,000 state and district level training workshops are being organized during the month of May and June 2019.
Six economic censuses have been conducted in India till date. The first economic census was undertaken in 1977, the second EC was carried out in 1980, followed by the third one in 1990. The fourth edition took place in 1998, while the fifth EC was held in 2005. The sixth edition of economic census was conducted in 2013.
