The Existing Scenario: The Deficit Economic Census
- Economic census of India is scheduled to monitor microenterprises along with other firms once in every five years.
- It is a sampling frame for informal sector surveys which help in estimation of informal sector contribution to GDP of India.
- Since inception in mid 1970s, following chronic challenges bad data quality, coordination problems between NSO and state DES, staff and supervision issues have plagued the census.
- It were also some issues in the execution of 7th economic census (2019-20) where most of the assignments were done to Common Service Centres (CSC) assigned by IT ministry and with very limited participation for the state.
- The outcome of 7th census is so unreliable that it may not be published.
Alternatives Needed
- India could build a meta database of enterprises instead of flawed quinquennial censuses on GST registrations and state level registrations under different laws like Shops and Establishments Act or Cooperative Act.
- A unique state ID could be assigned to each enterprise with dynamic updates of database status as per renewal data.
Challenges With This Approach
- They include a large number of microenterprises remaining unregistered, such as the following:
- Roadside vendors
- Seasonal businesses (selling sodas in summer)
- Food carts during the evening
- Tracking of these informal would still be necessary through sample surveys.
A New Proposition: Enterprise Sample Registration
- This has been modeled after the Sample Registration System (SRS) from the Registrar General of India (RGI), which will track birth and death.
- The ESRS would involve:
- Randomly selected villages and urban blocks across India.
- Part time enumerators would be observing a specific enterprise activity over a period.
- Capture the births, deaths, and re births of microenterprises.
- Dynamic real time insight into the volatility and fluidity of the microenterprise ecosystem in India would be provided.
Why ESRS is Important?
- Quinquennial censuses or occasional surveys cannot record the seasonality or the short term volatility in micro enterprises. It will enable ESRS to define economic contributions from small businesses acting at:
- Only in certain periods during the year
- Specific few hours within a day
- and hence will present rich information to policymakers, investors, and economic analysts.
Global Context and Long Term Relevance
- The Chinese economic census of 2023 points out that, even at the top of large industrial economies, millions exist in microenterprises.
- In this sense, micro enterprises will occupy a considerable economic space in India, with or without the success of its manufacturing ambitions.
- It needs to embrace, monitor, measure their real survey into vanishing figures into the void.
