Household Consumer Expenditure, Jan - June 2004
NSS 60th Round

India, 2004

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Reference ID

DDI-IND-MOSPI-NSSO-60Rnd-Sch1-Jan-June2004

Producer(s)

National Sample Survey Office

Collections

Household Consumption Expenditure

Metadata

DDI/XML JSON

Created on

Jan 18, 2018

Last modified

Feb 13, 2026

Page views

256070

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No. of Meals per day (B4_q9)

Data file: Block 4_Person records

Overview

Valid: 152426

Invalid: 243

Minimum: 0.0

Maximum: 3.0

Mean: 2.4256426069043338

Standard deviation: 0.5738819999113338

Type: Discrete

Width: 1

Format: Numeric

Questions and instructions

Literal question

How many meals do you usually take in a day?

Categories

Value	Cases
0	2140	1.4%
1	48	0%
2	81031	53.2%
3	69207	45.4%

Warning: these figures indicate the number of cases found in the data file. They cannot be interpreted as summary statistics of the population of interest.

Interviewer instructions

The number of meals consumed by a person is usually reported as 2 or 3. In rare cases, one may come across a person who may be taking food only once in a day or more than three times a day. While in the former case the number of meals for the person will be 1 per day, in the latter case, however, only 3 should be entered. That is, in this column, the recorded number of meals taken in a day, even if it is reported to be higher, should not exceed 3. A breast-fed baby does not directly share the food consumed by members of the household. Hence for such babies the entry in this column will be '0'.

Description

Definition

A 'meal' is composed of one or more readily eatable (generally cooked) items of food, the usually major constituent of which is cereals. The meals consumed by a person twice or thrice a day provide him/her the required energy (calorie) and other nutrients for living and for pursuing his/her normal avocations. A 'meal', as opposed to 'snacks', 'nashta' or 'high tea', contains larger quantum and variety of food. In rare cases, a full meal may contain larger quantity of non-cereal food. Even then, if the quantum of food in a plate is heavy as a meal, the contents of the food plate will also be considered as a 'meal'. Sometimes the contents of a 'nashta' may not be very different from the contents of a 'meal'. The difference in quantity will therefore be the guiding factor for deciding whether the plate is to be labelled as a 'meal' or a 'nashta'.

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Household Consumer Expenditure, Jan - June 2004 NSS 60th Round