BHUBANESWAR: Union Minister for Statistics and Programme Implementation DV Sadananda Gowda on Thursday launched the International Household Survey Network (IHSN) toolkit which will process the large scale sample survey and help in creating a robust documentation in an international standard format.
Inaugurating the workshop organised to sensitise State Government officials to use the toolkit, the Minister said the collection of huge data will not serve the purpose unless it is used for policy decisions and academic research which would benefit the common man.
‘’As a panacea, the toolkit, developed by IHSN, could be used to provide assistance in proper documentation, anonymisation, disseminating and preserving datasets in the international data bank for use in an optimum manner,’’ he said.
Stating that the Ministry has taken a number of initiatives in the field of data collection, processing and storage, he said Central Statistical Office (CSO) releases the Consumer Price Index (CPI) of rural, urban and the combination of both which involves collection of more than five lakh price quotations from over 1,181 villages and 1,114 markets.
‘’We have plans to launch the quarterly periodic labour force survey which will be conducted by making use of tablets and the same will be guided by computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technique. The project is expected to save time and will be performed by National Sample Survey (NSS) Organisation that will track as well as upload employment data,’’ he said.
Since the importance of services sector in the Indian economy has been growing continuously, a focused survey on the sector is being incorporated in the 74th round of NSS during 2016-17, Gowda said and added that a wide area network dedicated to information on State Domestic Product has been established to collect and present data from all 29 States and seven Union Territories at one platform.
Among others, Minister for Women and Child Development Usha Devi, Secretary of S&PI and Chief Statistician TCA Anant and Development Commissioner R Balakrishnan also spoke.