New Delhi, June 24 -- India will make yet another effort after more than four decades, to collect data on household incomes. The Ministry of Statistics has set up a Technical Expert Group (TEG) under the chairmanship of Surjit Bhalla, and seven other members from academia and private institutions for this. The household income survey has been tentatively scheduled for 2026, the ministry said in a press note issued on Monday. The decision to undertake yet another effort to collect income data is an extremely significant move for India's statistical system. Not only does India not have income data unlike many other countries, there has also been a long-standing debate in India about whether or not consumption data - the best proxy for household income data in India - is accurate and therefore underestimates well being levels of the Indian people in general. This debate has taken the form of economists flagging the growing discrepancy between consumption estimates generated from National Sample Survey Office's Consumption Expenditure Surveys and the National Account Statistics data. The latter has shown a growing gap with the former in India over the past decades. This discrepancy notwithstanding, there has been no consensus on whether the two estimates are necessarily superior from each other and government reports as well as eminent economists such as Nobel laureate Agnus Deaton warning against prioritizing one against the other on multiple occasions, including in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2015. The communique announcing the formation of the TEG for the proposed household income survey itself talks about the difficulties which previous attempts to collect income data have faced in the past. "MoSPI in past has made efforts for collecting information on household income along with the consumer expenditure surveys on experimental basis in the 9th round (May 1955 - September 1955) and 14th round (July 1958 - June 1959) though for which no information was released. Later, it undertook collection of data on receipts and disbursements as part of the Integrated Household Survey in its 19th round (July 1964 - June1965) and 24th round (July 1969 - June 1970) with the aim of obtaining a complete picture of transactions of household income. However, these efforts were not continued as it was found that the estimates of income were lower than the estimates of consumption and savings put together," the ministry said....