NCAER conducted the sole national survey of household incomes, savings and investments, in 1978. Such surveys in a country as big as India, with a part of household transactions taking place by barter and high incidence of tax evasion, create complications in generating reliable estimates of income and its distribNCAER conducted the sole national survey of household incomes, savings and investments, in 1978. Such surveys in a country as big as India, with a part of household transactions taking place by barter and high incidence of tax evasion, create complications in generating reliable estimates of income and its distribution. This makes the questionnaire and the survey as well as the subsequent analysis, very difficult since incomes and expenditures have to be estimated from the physical assets in possession and the usage of different products and services. The sample required is also very large and becomes even larger when estimates are needed at the state and even lower levels. Perhaps, it is for this reason that NCAER has not been able to conduct another such survey, because of lack of sponsors. ution.
The National Council of Applied Economic Research has conducted several surveys since 1986 to study the markets for a variety of consumer goods. As part of the fourth study in the series, the “market information survey of households (MISH)”, a household survey of medical care was conducted in 1990, to elicit information on the nature of illness suffered, sources of medical treatment and the cost of medical care. The results of the survey, published in 1992, evoked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers.
Bases on this experience, the council took up a more detailed Household Survey of Health Care Utilization and Expenditure in the summer months of 1993, covering most of the states and Union Territories of India. The results of this survey are presented in this report.
This may be the last budget which can be presented by the current government of India. It is therefore also a pre-general Election year Budget. It follows a series of election defeats of the ruling Congress Party, earlier in December 1994 in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; and this month (March 1995) in Maharashtra and Gujarat. It presents the budgets for 1995-96 at a time when almost all the macro-economic indicators are good. At the same time, investing communities in India and overseas want reassurance that the budget would give fresh signals about the determination of the government to proceed with reforms. After the series of electoral defeats it has been generally expected that the budget would be a “populist” one, meaning that it would give away vast sums of money in loosely framed programmes for the poor without any consideration for sound macro economic management.
The Human Development Report (HDR) published annually by UNDP has defined development as a process of widening people’s choices. Identifying three critical choices, viz., to have access to income and assets needed for a decent standard of living, to acquire knowledge, and to lead a long and healthy life, the HDR proposes a composite index- the Human Development Index (HDI) which combines the critical indicators in some way. The index has been used in ranking the countries according to this new paradigm of development.
The HDI, though superior to the traditional aggregate indices like GDP, is also an aggregate index failing to reveal disparities among population subgroups. It is thus, not useful for policy prescriptions for raising level of human development. Human development should from an integral part of the overall development plan to ensure successful translation of economic growth into improved quality and content of human life. A prerequisite to identification of the range of social concerns and fixation of goals and priorities for human development strategy is a detailed Human Development profile (HDP). The profile should address a broad range of national concerns relevant for the country depending on the current status of and deficiencies in various dimensions of human development. It should indicate the positions of various population subgroups in the human development ladder- who stands where, to make it easier to set long and short term goals, decide priorities and identify areas needing micro intervention.
Rural communication in India is on the threshold of a revolution as a result of indigenously designed rural telephone exchanges by the Centre for Development of Telematics and produced under its license by 30 manufactures.
Rural communication in India is on the threshold of a revolution as a result of indigenously designed rural telephone exchanges by the Centre for Development of Telematics and produced under its license by 30 manufactures. The NCAER study started with the question of whether the telephone is a mere luxury in rural areas or actually serves socio-economic purposes. Thus the goal was set to assess the catalytic nature of rural telecommunication services through a field survey to estimate the actual costs and benefits realized to the economy on account of setting up of C-Dot rural access exchanges (RAXs). Although there have been a few studies on the assessment of the role of information technology on economic development, these had neither used the social cost benefit analysis to estimate and translate benefits in terms of numeraire, nor used a representative sample survey to measure the impact through a study of rural exchanges already installed in different regions of the country.
Telecommunications have come a long way since F.B. Morse, the inventor of magnetic telegraphy, established the world’s first telecommunications facility in 1844. These, in turn, have been supplanted by an astoundingly vast and growing array of more sophisticated telecommunications capabilities like cellular phones, faxes, personal computer modems, and on-line data banks, etc. while these developments have been highlighted in the literature, unfortunately no study has been made on the impact of the setting-up of state of the art rural digital exchanges. The mission of this study was to clarify and quantify the socio-economic impact and the relative social costs and benefits of the provision of rural telecommunications services.
