At Data For India, two things allow us to capture a big shift - something changing in the data, yes, but more importantly, the availability of new data. In this year-ending edition of The Big Shift, we look at four new datasets in 2025 that allowed us to substantially advance our understanding of a changing India, and look ahead to one new dataset in 2026 that we hope will help fill gaps in our knowledge.
- New Sample Registration System reports
Between May and September this year, the office of the Registrar General of India published a bunch of reports after a gap of two years. These included the Sample Registration System's annual Statistical Report, the SRS' Cause of Death report, and the Medical Certification of Cause of Death report.
In any year, these reports are vital - they produce estimates of most key birth and death rates in India, and help us understand how fertility is falling, how mortality is changing, and how the causes of death in India are transforming over time. In 2025, they were invaluable.
For one, they were being published after a long wait; the most recent data published in 2022, was for the year 2020, and in 2025 the new reports covered the years 2021, 2022 and 2023. Crucially, these were no ordinary years: the new reports finally put official Indian numbers to mortality during the pandemic.
My colleague Nileena Suresh and I used this data in work that we did, and I wrote about the key insights from this data update in this piece here summarising the changes.
- Household consumption expenditure estimates
Since India does not currently collect data on incomes (see the end of this newsletter for an update on that), we, like many developing countries, use spending, or household consumption expenditure, as a proxy for incomes to understand how rich or poor people are. For over ten years after 2011-12, India had no new consumption expenditure survey. In 2022-23, a new round of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) was finally conducted, and published in 2024. One more round was conducted the year after, and published this year. The data gave us a vital insight into the distribution of the country into spending classes, and my colleague Abhishek Waghmare wrote about it for us. He also did an accompanying piece on changes in the methodology.
- Poverty estimates from the World Bank
India has not produced its own estimates of poverty for a decade. However, using newer data including the new HCES surveys, the Bank in June 2025 produced new global estimates of poverty. The numbers show that extreme poverty in India is now at just 5%, but poverty as defined by lower-middle-income countries (of which India is one) is much higher, at nearly 25%. You can read Abhishek's work on it for us here.
- High-frequency data on employment
India has produced granular data on employment and unemployment for over 50 years, but the chief criticism in the last decade or so was that this data was not high-frequency, which means that it did not come out as fast as researchers and analysts would like.
In 2025, India's National Statistics Office began to publish monthly estimates of employment and unemployment data, a far cry from the situation ten years ago when employment surveys were conducted every five years.
We used annual PLFS data in our work on a number of topics, one of which was this piece by Nileena for us on the dominance of custom tailoring in India's manufacturing sector.
- New in 2026: the Income Survey
Our work has allowed us to have a ringside view of improvements in India's statistical systems, some of which are reflected in the improved datasets listed above. There has also been a revival of a spirit of experimentation, and one great example of this is the National Household Income Survey that the National Statistics Office will launch in February 2026. This is the first time that India will attempt to collect data on household incomes - and not consumption - and produce national estimates.
For decades, the standard answer from India's statistical establishment on measuring income in India was simply this: it's just too hard to do in a poor, rural, informal economy. We may well find that the new survey is imperfect and that consumption surveys may continue to serve us better for now. But it's exciting to see a brave leap being made, and more data makes us all richer for it.
With these hopes for a braver, more experimental and more data-driven 2026, The Big Shift and Data For India wish you a happy new year!
