New Delhi, April 30 -- The National Statistics Office (NSO) has released the first report of its survey on capital investment by private firms which is meant to offer insights on the investment climate in the Indian economy. The report called, Forward looking Survey on Private Sector Capex Investment Intentions, is the first government database which can potentially provide guidance on investment outlook in the Indian economy. The report, which is based on a survey of large private sector enterprises between November 2024 to January 2025 shows that overall capex increased by 66% between FY22 to FY25 from Rs.3.94 lakh crore to Rs.6.56 lakh crore. These numbers, it needs to be underlined, are not to interpreted as representing the investment spending in the entire Indian economy as the report has only sought responses from private corporate enterprises above a certain turnover threshold: Rs.400 crore or more to manufacturing enterprises, Rs.300 crore or more for trading enterprises and Rs.100 crore or more for others. "It may be noted that all results presented in this booklet (report) pertain to larger enterprises with turnover exceeding the specified thresholds under survey frame. Therefore, these results do not represent the entire private corporate sector, and users should consider these constraints while interpreting the result", the report says. Because the data published in the report is unweighted (not adjusted for sampling biases) these numbers could be unreliable even for the specific thresholds. Given the fact that intended capex by companies is private and market moving information the report says that unit-level data for the survey is not being released. While the latest survey is the first such by the government on sector-wise and use-wise actual and intended capex by private companies, there does exist official data on actual investment spending by different institutions and use categories in the National Account Statistics data which is released by NSO....