the pilot survey finding income questions sensitive, the statistics machinery’s survey design is seeking to draw on the experiences of surveys conducted by countries like Australia, the United States (US), Canada and South Africa. What those countries actually do offers India a tested, but challenging, blueprint.
The United States Census Bureau treats reluctance as something money can ease. A randomised experiment within the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) found that households that were handed unconditional cash before any interview left fewer income questions blank and their reporting of investment income was markedly more accurate.
“Individuals in incentive-receiving households have a 1.3-percentage-point lower earnings non-response rate than those in non-incentive households,” according to the US Census Bureau working paper on the Effects of Monetary Incentives on Earnings Non-Response in the SIPP.
“The model of pre-incentive for response is a very questionable model. There’s a lot of argumentation that’s gone into it,” said Pronab Sen, former chief statistician for the government of India.
He argued that the concern is that when respondents are paid, they may feel obliged to tell the interviewer what they think the interviewer wants to hear, a risk he described as conjectural and impossible to prove.
“But this is one of the main reasons why we have never offered money. We sell it [NHIS] as something for national interest,” he added.
Australia’s Survey of Income and Housing, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), uses a mix of methods. Since the 2019-20 cycle, households can fill up an online form themselves, though some households have continued to prefer a face-to-face or telephone interview.
The ABS has also been trying to lean on existing records — tax, payroll and welfare data — to supplement and replace what it asks households directly, so that data is reused rather than recollected.
But this self-reliance has limits: When the agency leaned too heavily on administrative sources and let respondents skip difficult questions in its 2023-24 round, data quality collapsed, and the ABS took the rare step of refusing to publish the results at all. For the current 2025-26 cycle, it has reinstated questions on superannuation balances and government payments that it had earlier tried to source from records alone.
Canada goes furthest of all; it mostly stops asking. Rather than quizzing households on what they earn, the Canadian Income Survey draws income directly from tax records held by the revenue agency, now spanning both filed returns and associated tax slips.
South Africa takes the most labour-intensive route of all. Rather than a single sit-down interview, its statistics agency, Stats SA, runs the Income and Expenditure Survey by embedding itself in a household’s daily life for a month.
Sampled families are visited repeatedly and they are also asked to keep a weekly expenditure diary, supplied by Stats SA, recording every purchase and acquisition over two weeks. The interviews are done face-to-face
on tablets (Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews), with phone interviews used only where an in-person visit isn’t possible.
What India’s statisticians will actually borrow from any of this, and how well they will replicate in the Indian context is, however, yet to be seen.
