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COMPILATION OF NATIONAL ACCOUNTS STATISTICS IN INDIA 103
In pursuance of the recommendation of the Working Group, a series of meetings were
held between the officials of the RBI and the CSO to reconcile the differences in the estimates.
Finally both organizations agreed on a uniform methodology and database. It was also decided
that each agency would be responsible for the compilation of estimates of specified sectors
and supply the data to the other agency. Accordingly, the CSO, now prepares the estimates of
public sector (both saving and capital formation) and household saving in the form of physical
assets, life funds, provident and pension funds, while the responsibility of estimating the
saving and investment of the private corporate sector and that of the household sector’s
saving in other instruments of financial saving is entrusted to the RBI. This arrangement has
gone a long way in clearing the doubts, which earlier used to be created in the minds of the
users due to two different sets of estimates. Now the estimates of saving released by the CSO
and RBI are the same.
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Subsequently, the Department of Statistics set up an Expert Group on Saving and Capital
formation under the Chairmanship of Professor V.M. Dandekar on April 1995 to review the
existing methodology and recommend improvements in the methods and procedures of
estimation of saving and capital formation. After the demise of Prof. Dandekar, the Expert
Group was reconstituted on September1995 with the same set of terms of reference and with
Professor Raja J. Chelliah as Chairman. The Committee submitted its Report on December
1996.
Although the Committee did not recommend any major changes in the compilation
procedures, its recommendations were more directed towards improving the quality of
existing estimates. These recommendations, included, compilation of flow of funds accounts,
updations of rates and ratios, regular review of life of fixed assets, improving the estimates of
local bodies, covering top 1500 companies on census basis, for the purpose of estimating
capital formation in the private corporate sector, examining the feasibility of conducting
income expenditure surveys on a periodic basis, and launching of regular enterprise surveys
by the NSSO for collecting investment data for the household sector.
XIII. State Domestic Product
The work on income estimation for the different States in India began as early as in 1948-49 in
the erstwhile State of Bombay and in the States of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. The
first set of detailed estimates of State Income were first published in January 1950 by the
erstwhile state of Bombay for the year 1948-49 and subsequently in 1951 and 1952 for the
years 1949-50 and 1950-51. Uttar Pradesh on the other hand, was the first State to prepare
estimates with rural-urban distribution in 1953 for the year 1947-48 to 1950-51. Later other
States like Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal also initiated work on the subject. The
position was reviewed by the Fifth Joint Conference of Central and State Statisticians in 1956
and it was recommended that the States should prepare estimates of State Income broadly on
the lines followed by the National Income Committee. Simultaneously, with a view to
streamlining the work and ensuring adoption of uniform concepts and definitions to the extent
possible as well as methodologies by the States in the preparation of estimates of State
Domestic Product from the various sectors, the Central Statistical Organisation, on the
recommendation of the Preliminary Conference on Research in national Income held in
January, 1957, constituted a Working Group on State Income consisting of experts engaged in