Govt to begin fieldwork for 7th Economic Census from Tripura on Monday

In order to get a complete count of all economic units in the country, the government plans to kick off the mammoth task of conducting the Seventh Economic Census from Monday, July 29.

"Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) intends to conduct the Seventh Economic Census of India 2019 by extensively leveraging Information Technology," as per a government circular.

CSC e-Governance Services India Limited, a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) formed under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeITY), has been selected as the implementation agency for the development of ICT platform system and conduction of fieldwork for the 7th Economic Census, the circular added.

Earlier too, collecting data for the survey has been a flagship task of MoSPI, that has overall conducted 6 Economic Censuses during, 1977, 1980, 1990, 1998, 2005 and 2013. The ministry aims to capture the complete count of all establishments located within the geographical boundary of India.

The exercise will start with the state of Tripura followed by Puducherry, as per media reports.

Unlike the earlier economic censuses, in which the report generation involved a lot of manual intervention, the 7th Economic Census is proposed to make use of IT application and platform, the implementation report stated. "It took 3 years 6 months to bring out the final report of the 6th EC after its launch in January 2013 due to manual intervention in the generation of the reports", the report said.

The 7th EC will use technological interventions in the fieldwork and develop a nationwide Business Register for dynamic updation. The implementation report states that "Census will be conducted using an ICT web-based platform, through customised software designed for data capturing, validation and report generation along with features of geo-tagging and back-end integration with other data sources such as GST."

The census will capture the information on various economic variables like nature of the economic activity, employment size, type of establishment et. for all non-agricultural establishments at the Stae and Sub-State level.

The Economic Census, that becomes the only source of information on the significantly large unorganised sector in the country, carries significant information that gets used by many arms of the Government, such as various central ministries, state governments, apex organisations such as the GST Council, Reserve Bank of India, NITI Aayog and many others, for policy formulation. The fieldwork for the census is expected to be completed by December and the results are expected to be available by March 2020, at the national level.

"The total manpower to be engaged in fieldwork is expected to be around 10 lakh," the ministry said in its statement. As per the last Economic Census conducted in 2013, there were 58.5 million establishments employing around 131 million workers.

The data that is collected through door-to-door survey of each household and commercial establishment,  will be used for generation of the dynamic business register, as well as the statistical reports as required by MoSPI.

All households/establishments engaged in non-agricultural economic activities including construction, except public administration, defence and compulsory social security, are proposed to be covered in the 7th Economic Census.

Edited by Rupa Burman Roy

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