array of goods and services.<sup>7</sup> The Survey on Social Consumption (SCS) on Health gathers basic information on health, and the role of public and private health providers. It started on a regular basis since 1995 and the most recent waves correspond to years 2004, 2014 and 2017/18. Similarly, the SCS on Education generates indicators on levels of education, school attendance and incentives received by students. The most recent waves were collected in 2007/08, 2014 (January to June) and 2017/18. In both SCSs, household consumption is captured through a single question on “usual monthly expenditures”. Finally, the Periodic Labor Force (PLB) Survey was launched by the NSO in April 2017. This is a continuous survey that collects information about employment and unemployment. Quarterly reports are produced, and only two annual reports have been produced so far: 2017/18 and 2018/19. As in the case of the SCS, it includes a single question on household consumption expenditure.

Two surveys collected by non-government agencies are also available. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS), compiled by several independent research institutions: The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the University of Maryland, Indiana University and the University of Michigan. It is a panel survey whose first wave was collected in 2005/06, its second in 2011/12 and the third is scheduled for 2023. In 2017, a subsample round was collected in only three states: Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand. Finally, the Consumer Pyramids (CP) data set is a continuous survey designed to measure household well-being in India, with a panel survey conducted three times per year since 2014. It is collected by the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), a private data collection agency.

Using these alternative surveys, the remainder of this section reports summary statistics on recent trends in living standards.

# **2.1. Official data sources**

The SCSs on Education and Health are nationally representative surveys with a sample size of around 65,000 households in the earlier years, and around 100,000 in 2017/18. These surveys include a question on usual household consumption that is not comparable to the more comprehensive consumption aggregates produced for poverty estimation in the CES. The SCSs on Health and Education both show higher average consumption in 2017/18 than in previous waves.<sup>8</sup> Mean household consumption per capita appears larger in the CES than in SCS, for both urban and rural areas, although it is difficult to draw comparisons since the surveys were fielded in

> 7 Differences in the recall period of these different items led to different consumption aggregates over time. The 2011/12 survey included three different definitions of the aggregate: the so-called Uniform Reference Period (URP), Mixed Reference Period (MRP) and the Modified Mixed Reference Period (MMRP). The 2017/18 survey only included the MMRP. For details on the consumption aggregates, see http://mospi.nic.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/KI-68th-HCE.pdf. Also see discussion in the Appendix. 8 We do not report the evolution of the consumption aggregate in the Periodic Labor Force Survey because there is no comparable survey before 2017. Comparing the PLFS (2017/18) and SCS Education (2014), Himanshu (2019) estimates that real consumption per capita declined by about 4 percent and 0.6 percent in rural and urban India, respectively.

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