National Sample Survey: How India taught the world the art of collecting data

However the outcomes of the survey have been extraordinary, delivering remarkably granular details about the each day lives of Indians. The second survey, for instance, instructed policymakers precisely how a lot one Chidambaram Mudaly, his spouse, three daughters, and mother-in-law – who lived in a distant village within the southern state of Tamil Nadu – spent on ghee, rice, wheat, salt, tea, chillies and different necessities. Whereas this household’s monetary outlay wasn’t important by itself, when aggregated with tens of 1000’s of different information factors, it allowed financial planners and policymakers to know the financial system in a basically completely different method.