Mint Explainer: What the latest survey of household consumption spending reveals

livemint.com:

₹3,773 a month on average as consumption expenditure in 2022-23 while her urban counterpart spent ₹6,459, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s (MOSPI’s) National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) estimated after a nationwide study of households’ spending patterns. Of this, consumers in rural India spent about 46% on food and those in urban areas about 39%. Other expenses include health, education, rent, clothing and conveyance.

Significantly, the share of spending on food has fallen below 50% for the first time in rural India. The NSSO has been conducting household consumption expenditure surveys once every five years since 1972-73. The results of the last survey, conducted in 2017-18, were withheld over what the government described as “data quality issues", though many believe an uncomfortable fall in average consumption was the real reason for that decision.

The findings of the survey conducted in 2011-12 are thus the ministry’s last published report on consumption expenditure patterns of households. These surveys serve a variety of purposes – they aid policymaking, are used for weighting diagrams to construct the consumer price index (CPI), and also to estimate the country’s GDP. The survey is keenly followed by industry, which uses it to draw up medium-to-long-term growth strategies.

So far MOSPI has published only a factsheet of the survey’s findings. It intends to publish a detailed report based on data – collected from 2.62 lakh households (1.55 lakh in rural areas and 1.07 lakh in urban areas) between August 2022 and July 2023 – at a later date. The factsheet estimates that monthly per-capita consumption expenditure rose 164% in rural India compared to 146% in urban India.