GURUGRAM: Field staff of the National Statistics Office (NSO) will be knocking on doors in a set of Gurugram sectors, colonies and villages through October, collecting answers for six national sample surveys on jobs, small businesses, household income, migration, debt and farm households.
The work is being done by the Field Operations Division of the NSO, which sits under the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). The schedule was made public on Wednesday in a Haryana government press release that also names the places where households have been picked.
The urban list covers Sector 3A, Sector 6, Devi Lal Nagar in Sector 9, Prem Puri in Sector 32, Sukhrali, Nihal Colony, Islampur Colony, Bhondsi and Garg Colony in Farrukhnagar. In the rural part of the district, the villages selected are Jori, Heraheri, Bapas, Janaula, Nawada Fatehpur and Ghamroj.
Not every house in these places will get a visit. National sample surveys pick blocks and villages first and then a set of households inside them, so that a limited number of interviews can stand in for the whole population. A family in Sukhrali may be asked to take part while the house next door is not.
Six surveys, six sets of questions
The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) is the source of India's official unemployment and labour force figures. Its questions are about who in the household works, what kind of work it is, how many hours they put in and whether anyone is looking for a job.
The Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) goes to small unregistered businesses rather than to homes: the kirana store at the corner, a tailoring unit, a two-person repair shop. Owners in the selected blocks may be asked about workers, costs and receipts.
The National Household Income Survey (NHIS) is new. According to the ministry's page on the income survey and its instructions to field staff, fieldwork runs from April 2026 to March 2027 in four three-month sub-rounds, which puts October in the third, and answers are recorded electronically through computer-assisted personal interviewing.
The All India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) records what households own and what they owe, from land and buildings to loans taken from formal and informal sources. The Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of agricultural households looks at farm income and costs, land, livestock, credit and use of government schemes. A Press Information Bureau release from MoSPI placed both between July 2026 and June 2027.
The sixth is a survey on migration, which looks at why people moved, from where and when. For a city that draws workers from across north India, those answers matter for planning housing, transport and services.
The state release says the surveys give reliable data on employment, informal enterprises, household income, the reasons for migration, family assets and debt, and the economic condition of farm households, and that this data underpins policy decisions and socio-economic planning. National reports on joblessness or household debt are built from interviews of exactly this kind, so the numbers are only as good as the answers given at the doorstep.
The NSO has asked selected households and establishments to cooperate with its officers and give correct and complete information. It has said that everything respondents share will be kept confidential and used only for statistical purposes.
The release does not say how field staff can be identified. Residents who are unsure about a visitor can ask to see official identification before answering questions about income, loans or property. No statistical survey needs a bank PIN or a one-time password, so anyone asking for those is not part of this exercise.
Gurugram households have already had one round of official visitors this year for the census house-listing, and primary teachers who did that work say their census-duty pay is still pending. Results from another national exercise, the first household travel survey, showed 42.6 per cent of people going to work on two-wheelers, as covered in our story on the travel survey findings.
The national surveys run beyond October in other parts of the country. For the Gurugram areas named in the release, the visits are scheduled for this month.
