India - Employment and Unemployment Survey, July 2005 - June 2006, NSS 62nd Round

An outline of the sampling design: The 62nd round (July 2005 - June 2006) of NSS was earmarked for survey on unorganised manufacturing enterprises, annual survey of consumer expenditure and survey on employment – unemployment. The sampling design adopted for the survey was essentially a stratified multi-stage one for both rural and urban areas. Two frames were used for this survey viz. List frame and Area frame. List frame was used only for urban sector and that too for selection of manufacturing enterprises only and thus is not relevant for discussion. Area frame was adopted for both rural and urban sectors for selection of First Stage Units (FSU) . For the area frame, the list of villages as per census 2001 (for Manipur, 1991 census was used since 2001 census list was not available) was used as frame for the rural sector and the latest available list of UFS blocks was used as frame in the urban sector. However, EC-98 was used as frame for the 27 towns with population 10 lakhs or more (as per Census 2001). The ultimate stage units (USU) were households, in both the sectors. In the case of large villages/ blocks requiring hamlet-group (hg)/ sub-block (sb) formation, one intermediate stage was the selection of two hgs/ sbs from each FSU.

Sample Size – first stage units: At the all-India level, a total number of 9997 FSUs (4847 villages in the rural areas and 5150 UFS blocks in the urban areas) for area frame were allocated on the basis of investigator strength. The allocation between rural and urban sectors was made in proportion to the number of unorganised non-agricultural workers as per EC-98. The total (all-India) rural/ urban sample FSUs were allocated to different States and U.Ts. in proportion to number of unorganised non-agriculture workers as per EC-98 subject to the availability of investigators ensuring more or less uniform work-load. Within each sector of a State/ U.T, the respective sample sizes were allocated to the different strata in proportion to the stratum population as per census 2001.Out of these 9997 FSUs allotted for survey, 9923 FSUs could be surveyed - 4798 in rural and 5125 in urban. Note that in the 62nd round, a sample of 10706 FSUs (4962 villages and 5744 urban blocks) was also selected for survey by the state agencies (State sample) at the all-India level.

Sample size – second stage units: For Schedule 10, a sample of 8 households was planned to be surveyed from each selected village and urban block. In the Central sample, 78879 households were actually surveyed – 37975 in rural areas and 40904 in urban areas.
As regards the actual number of persons surveyed, it was 186571 in the rural sector and 190806 in the urban sector.


There was no deviation from the original sample deviation.


For generating any estimate, one has to extract relevant portion of the data, and aggregate after applying the weights.

Weights (or multipliers) VARIABLES are given at the end of record of each dataset. The weights (multipliers) are
WGT_SS for Sub-sample-wise estimation and WGT_Comb for combined subsample estimates.

All records of a household will have same weight figure. In case of those Blocks/Levels, where Item/Person Sl.No. is not applicable the field is filled up with 00000.

Use of subsample-wise weights (multipliers)

For generating subsample-wise estimates based on data of all subrounds taken together, either Subsample-1 households
or Subsample-2 households are to be considered at one time. Subsample code is available in the dataset For generating subsample-combined estimates based on data of all subrounds taken together all households are to be considered.