India - Village Facilities Survey , July 2002-December 2002, NSS 58th Round

Broad sample design (rural): A stratified multi-stage design was adopted for the survey of the NSS 58th round. The first stage units were 1991 Census villages (Panchayat wards for Kerala) in general and 1981 Census villages for Jammu & Kashmir. Normally, the rural areas of each district formed a stratum. Wherever the rural population of a district exceeded a certain limit, the district was divided into a number of strata. The sample villages were selected with probability proportional to population (except for special strata consisting of small villages where simple random sampling was done), in the form of two independent sub-samples from each stratum. In all, 4646 sample villages were surveyed at the all-India level in this round.

Outline of Sample Design: A stratified multi-stage design was adopted for the conduct of the NSS 58th round. The first-stage units were census villages (panchayat wards for Kerala) in the rural sector.

Sampling Frame for First-Stage Units: For the rural sector, the list of Census 1991 villages (panchayat wards for Kerala) constituted the sampling frame, except in the case of J & K where Census 1981 villages formed the frame.

Stratification :
Rural sector: Two special strata were formed at the State/ UT level on the basis of the population census of 1991, viz.
Stratum 1: all FSUs with population between 0 and 50, and
Stratum 2: FSUs with population more than 15,000
Special stratum 1 was formed if at least 50 such FSUs were found in a State/UT.
Similarly, special stratum 2 was formed if at least 4 such FSUs were found in a
State/UT. Otherwise, such FSUs were merged with the general strata.
From the remaining FSUs (not covered under strata 1 & 2) general strata (hereafter, stratum will refer to general stratum unless otherwise mentioned) were formed and numbered 3, 4, 5, etc. (even if no special strata had been formed). Each district of a State/UT was normally treated as a separate stratum. However, if the provisional population of the district was greater than or equal to 2.5 million as per Census 2001, the district was divided into two or more strata with more or less equal populations as per Census 1991 by grouping contiguous tehsils. However, in Gujarat, some districts were not wholly contained in an NSS region. In such cases, the part of the district falling in an NSS region constituted a separate stratum.

Total sample size (FSUs): A total of 4834 FSUs were selected for survey as the Central sample for the rural sector.

Allocation of rural sample to strata/ sub-strata: In the rural sector the sample size allotted to a State/UT were allocated to different strata in proportion to populations of the strata. All the stratum- level allocations were adjusted to multiples of 2.

Selection of FSUs: FSUs were selected in the form of two independent subsamples.
For special stratum 2 and all the general strata of the rural sector, FSUs were selected by probability proportional to size with replacement (PPSWR) where size was the 1991 Census population.


There was no deviation from the original sampling design


Number of units (villages) to be surveyed : 4786
Number of units responded : 4646
Response rate (%) : 97.07


Multiplier has been computed for sub-sample and combined.
WGT is the weight which should be applied for estimation.