India to Conduct First Nationwide Household Income Survey in 2026 Under MoSPI to Strengthen Data on Inequality and Welfare.

India will launch its first-ever All-India Household Income Survey in 2026 under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), aiming to gather direct data on household earnings across sectors.

      - The initiative is being led by Minister of State (Independent Charge) Rao Inderjit Singh, with MoSPI forming a Technical Expert Group (TEG) in June 2025 under the chairmanship of Dr. Surjit S. Bhalla, former Executive Director for India at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This decision follows decades of demand for granular income data to supplement the regular consumption-based National Sample Surveys (NSS).

      - The 2026 survey will be the first comprehensive national attempt to estimate household income from all sources—formal wages, informal earnings, agriculture, self-employment, remittances, rental income, pensions, and more. Earlier efforts in the 1950s, 60s, and the 1983–84 NSS round were either limited in scope or methodologically inconsistent, failing to provide usable national income distribution estimates.

      - The Technical Expert Group includes key economists like Aloke Kar (ISI Kolkata), Prof. Sonalde Desai (NCAER), Prof. Praveen Jha (JNU), Prof. Srijit Mishra, Tirthankar Patnaik (NSE), Rajesh Shukla (People Research on India’s Consumer Economy), and Prof. Ram Singh (Delhi School of Economics). Their responsibilities include drafting the questionnaire, designing sampling methods, ensuring comparability with international data standards, and formulating protocols for field operations.

Main Point :-   (i) The household income survey is expected to launch in early 2026, tentatively in the February to June window. The National Statistical Office (NSO), a wing of MoSPI, will carry out the fieldwork using modern digital tools like Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI). Enumerators will be trained extensively, and supervisory mechanisms will be in place to maintain accuracy, especially in estimating income from informal sectors.

      (ii) This survey is part of MoSPI’s broader statistical reforms. Alongside it, MoSPI is preparing to revise base years of major macroeconomic indicators—Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Consumer Price Index (CPI), and Index of Industrial Production (IIP)—by early 2026. Other complementary surveys like the Quarterly Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey and Quarterly Construction Sector Employment Survey are also in progress, aimed at building a richer, high-frequency statistical ecosystem.

(iii) The new Household Income Survey will help policymakers address inequality more effectively, improve targeting for schemes like PM-KISAN, PM-Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, and PMAY, and guide progressive taxation reforms. It will also align India with international best practices in evidence-based policymaking, offering an essential tool for planning, welfare design, and economic analysis.
About MoSPI