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The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) has started mapping all the service establishments across the country to get better sense of this segment of the economy.
The establishment-focussed survey on services sector could gradually pave the way for an Annual Survey of Services. The exercise is a part of the NSSO’s 74th round and is being carried out from July 1 this year to June 30 next year.
“It is focussed on service sector enterprises. Both national accounts division and other users have been asking on richer data on the services sector,” said TCA Anant, Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
Little official data Though the services sector is the main contributor to the country’s gross domestic product and accounts for nearly 60 per cent of it, there is little official data on economic activities by the sector.
The sector has also remained an outlier at times and has largely grown at a robust pace even when the overall economic growth may not have been equally buoyant.
The Ministry is hopeful that results of the survey will help it move to a more frequent data collection exercise on services sector enterprises, on the lines of the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI).
“If we are able to do the NSSO survey satisfactorily, we will try to see if we can try to convert it into a more regular and permanent survey like the ASI,” Anant told BusinessLine .
Results The first round results of the survey are expected in 2018 but detailed results would be available later.
At present, much of the data on the services sector comes from the Reserve Bank of India and private surveys.
The NSSO is understood to be solely concentrating on the services establishment survey in the 74th round and will not work on other issues in the period.
In the past, it has conducted various surveys to capture trends in the services sector such as one on unincorporated non-agricultural enterprises and on unorganised service sector enterprises.
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