India - Household Consumer Expenditure, July 1993 - June 1994, NSS 50th Round

This block will be filled after completion of the enquiry on all the preceding blocks. The expression in item 1 - "getting two square meals a day" - as used in common parlance, conveys that the concerned person gets, by and large, sufficient food to eat. This question is asked in order to know the percep­tion of the household regarding sufficiency of food. While put­ting this question to the informant, it is thus presumed that the informant has a clear understanding of its meaning. There are equivalent phrases conveying the same meaning in regional lan­guages. It is, therefore, important to put the proper question in the local language and record the answer given by the informant in the appropriate code.

Care should be taken to see that the informant is not offended by this question. The question should, in fact, not be asked to those whose reported consumption would obviously in­dicate that they get sufficient food to eat. In item 1, if the members of the household are reported as getting two square meals a day, throughout the year, the code to be entered in the box space of this block is 1. If adequate food is available in only a few months of the year code 2 will be noted. Code 3 will indicate that the household does not usually get two square meals a day for all its members. Here the reference period is last 12 calen­dar months preceding the date of enquiry.

If adequate food was available in only some months of the year i.e. if code 2 is recorded in item 1, those calendar months in which all members of the household did not have two square meals a day will be recorded in cells provided against item 2 in codes. For example, suppose all members of a sample household did not have two square meals a day in the months of January and March during the reference period. The entries to be made are 01 & 03 in first two cells out of the 12 cells provided in the block against item 2.