Govt mulls annual services sector survey

The government is planning an annual services sector survey on the lines of the yearly exercise which tracks the performance of industries, a senior official said today.

"We are planning an annual survey for services which will give regular data on the sector's detailed performance, " Chief Statistician T C A Anant said while addressing CII Services Conclave 2013 here in the capital.

At present, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation brings out an industries survey every year which provides data on the performance of the sector.

Experts feel that there is need for a similar survey for services to provide data on the sector for timely and effective policy action.

The services sector has a dominant share in India's GDP. It contributes over 60% to the Gross Domestic Product.

According to Anant, there is need to appoint nodal agency for collecting data for annual survey of services. The data on manufactured goods for annual industries survey is collected by the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics.

The Chief Statistician said that there may be need for supplementary legislation for collection of services data. At present, the data for surveys is collected as per the Collection of Statistics Act.

He said the data available from institutions to analyse the performance is inadequate at present.

For instance, the RBI tracks transactions in services sector but all of those are not routed through the central bank. Certain transactions in case of foreign education and medical tourism are not routed through the RBI.

Talking about his Ministry's efforts to improve data collection, he informed that a web-based data collection system has been developed, which in future would be used for collecting data for industries as well as the services sector.

According to him, the present system of physical data collection is very cumbersome and the industry should come forward to provide data so that actual state of economy could be gauged.