Indian Economy Quiz: National Statistical System: NSO and Major Surveys

In 2019 the government merged the two bodies into a single National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, so that the preparation of the national accounts and the conduct of the large sample surveys would sit in one office.

National Statistics Day has been observed on 29 June every year since 2007 to mark the birth anniversary of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and to create awareness about the use of statistics in planning and policy; a theme is announced each year by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata in 1931, set up the National Sample Survey in 1950, gave statistics the distance measure named after him, pioneered large scale sample surveys and pilot surveys, and prepared the plan frame of the Second Five Year Plan, which placed heavy…

The census is taken by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs, under the authority of the Census Act of 1948; the same office maintains the civil registration system of births and deaths.

The census of 1881, taken under the Viceroy Lord Ripon and directed by W. C. Plowden, was the first to be carried out on one reference date across the whole country, and the unbroken decennial series of Indian censuses is counted from it.

The survey was launched in 2017 in place of the earlier five-yearly employment and unemployment rounds of the National Sample Survey, and it reports the labour force participation rate, the worker population ratio and the unemployment rate on the three activity statuses, namely usual status, current weekly status and current…

The commission headed by C. Rangarajan reviewed the Indian statistical system and recommended a permanent and autonomous body to lay down standards, so the National Statistical Commission was constituted in 2005 as an advisory body with a part-time chairperson, members and the chief executive officer as its secretary; the chief…

It empowers the Union, the State and local governments to collect statistics on economic, demographic, social, scientific and environmental matters, obliges the informant to furnish the information asked for, and bars the disclosure of the information of an individual informant for any purpose other than statistics; it was amended in…

The index measures the short term change in the volume of production of the industrial sector and is published every month, with mining, manufacturing and electricity as its three sectors and a use-based classification into primary goods, capital goods, intermediate goods, infrastructure and construction goods, consumer durables and consumer non-durables.

The Office of the Economic Adviser in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, which is a department of that ministry, compiles and releases the Wholesale Price Index every month, along with the index of eight core industries; the wholesale index covers primary articles, fuel and power and…