GUWAHATI, Sept 13 - The fieldwork for the 7th Economic Census, which will provide valuable insight into geographical spread, clusters of economic activities, ownership pattern, persons engaged in establishments associated with economic activity, was today launched in the State.
The Economic Census is being conducted by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to provide disaggregated information on various operational and structural aspects of all economic establishments in the country. All structures across the State, whether residential, commercial, or both, will be covered in the Economic Census.
For the conduct of the census, the MoSPI has partnered with CSC e-Governance Services India Limited (under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) as the implementing agency. Collaboration with CSC is expected to improve fieldwork timelines and harmonize the standard, quality and training of enumerators/supervisors. The enumerators and supervisors engaged by CSC have been trained to collect data on mobile application developed for data capture, validation, report generation and dissemination, State head of CSC Gyan Doley said.
The data will be collected through door-to-door survey of each household and commercial establishment under the provisions of Collection of Statistics Act, 2008. Household and establishment-level data collected will be kept strictly confidential and used only for developmental planning and statistical purposes by the State and the Central governments.
The data collected by enumerators will be verified by supervisors in subsequent visit to the concerned household and establishments. After completion of data collection and processing, the statistical results of 7th Economic Census would be released.
The importance of the data collected will be immense as it is information of one of its kind with comprehensive details of structure and spread of economic activities in the country. It is the only source of information on the significantly large unorganized sector in the country. The information will be available at the lowest administrative level, i.e., village and ward. The State and Central governments may leverage this database for focused policy-making and local level planning to benefit the industry, especially the MSME sector and the citizens at large.
The previous censuses have been conducted in paper schedules through enumerators engaged by the State governments. In the 7th EC, data will be collected, validated and disseminated through advanced IT usage which is expected to reduce the lag in finalization of results as well as improve accuracy and coverage of the data. Adherence to data collection protocols and guidelines are being supervised by State and Central government officials through advanced IT applications. They will also conduct sample checks on data collected to ascertain complete coverage and quality.
A dedicated help desk with regional language support has been set up with a toll-free number (1800-3000-3468) for addressing queries of field workers and citizens in general. Similarly, a dedicated web-page has been created on the website of the ministry to facilitate dissemination of information on various aspects of conduct of 7th EC.
The Sixth Economic Census was conducted between January 2013 and April 2014.
