We are pleased to announce a substantial enhancement of the Consumer Pyramids_dx service.

Hitherto, the Consumer Pyramids_dx service delivered raw record level data at the end of every month and at the end of every Wave. The monthly files are on the income and expenses of the sample households and the Wave files provide data on sample household member characteristics (called the People of India files) and also the assets and liabilities of sample households.

The service was designed to provide the raw data files with full documentation on survey design, sampling methodology and relevant weights associated with the observations. The delivery is of the sample data.

Raw sample data for 32 Waves spanning over a period of over a decade since 2014 have been delivered. Hundreds of researchers have used this dataset and produced several peer-reviewed research papers based on this.

All of the above would continue as before.

We have now added several tabulations to the services. These tabulations present population estimates of household income and expenses. Users can, of course, derive these estimates from the record level sample household data available with them from the services. But, to make it easier for those who would prefer not to spend too much time deriving these estimates, we make them readily available in several tabulations.

There are over 300,000 tabulations for one frequency of data. There are three frequencies annual, quarter and month for which the estimates are made. This includes estimates at the state level as well. A simple navigation bar is provided to help find the appropriate tabulation.

The population estimate tabulations are available in the Estimations option in the Menu Bar. There are Income tabulations and Total Expenditure tabulations.

Income tabulations include one that provides the sources of household income. Sources include wages, pensions, transfers, profits, and a few more. Total income of all households is also decomposed by income groups, by occupation, education, religion and caste. For each of these there are tabulations on the count of all households, the sum of the indicator across all households, the mean, median and selectively the per-capita values and also the gini-coefficients.

The expenses tabulations provide all of the above for 145 expense heads of the households. Household expenses are available by income groups and by occupation of household.

Data is presented at the all-India level, state level and at the homogeneous region level.

The tabulations provide data from January 2014 when the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey began. The tabulations are currently updated till June 2024. All tabulations will be updated as and when the updates become available.

Monthly estimates will be released with a lag of 4 months. Quarterly and annual data will also be available with a lag of 4 months.

The expansion will also include analysis. Analysts at CMIE will analyse the data releases and post these on the Consumer Pyramids_dx website regularly.

The raw data is now available under the Raw Data option in the Menu Bar. The user interface inside this option remains as it was before.