Economic Census is gigantic, complicated exercise: Vasan

New Delhi, Jun 12: Dubbed "more complicated than even the Population Census", the Fifth Economic Census undertaken by the Statistics and Programme Implementation Ministry is one of the largest administrative exercise for data collection on enumeration basis in the country.

Giving details behind the mammoth exercise of conducting the survey, Statistics and Programme Implementation Minister G K Vasan told a gathering that an expenditure of more than Rs 90 crore was incurred to collect data from the large number of enterprises and a total of 21.1 crore households in the country.

Further, the Minister pointed out, the final results which were due in December this year would provide data input for the National Business Register for which his Ministry has completed a pilot study in two districts of Andhra Pradesh.

An innovation introduced was that a directory of enterprises employing 10 or more workers was sought to be built up which would become the basis for the preparation of the Business Register.

"The list would be of immense use for undertaking detailed surveys particularly in respect of services sector which contributes about 54 per cent to the country's GDP," the minister said.

The Census also adopted state-of-the-art Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) technology for the first time in the data scanning for faster compilation.

According to R C Panda, Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the provisional results of the Economic Census indicate that the economic reforms are providing better economic, industrial entrepreneurial and employment opportunities in the country.

UNI