The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) plans to conduct surveys to gauge the sentiment among businesses using its proposed Statistical Business Register. The register – which is to be based on administrative data ranging from the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, among others – will list all formal business entities on a dynamic basis, covering their birth, death, split, and merger.
According to a presentation made at MoSPI’s two-day workshop on ‘Using Alternate Data Sources and Frontier Technologies for Policy Making’ that concluded on Friday, the business register will also feature an artificial intelligence-based search engine.
To be sure, any sentiment or business outlook survey seems to be some time away, with the statistics ministry setting up a 21-member working group to develop Integrated Official Business Statistics only on March 4, 2025. The working group, chaired by a MoSPI official, has representatives from the ministries of commerce, corporate affairs, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises, electronics and information technology, finance, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), among others, as per an office memorandum seen by The Indian Express.
The working group has been tasked with preparing a dynamic Statistical Business Register and developing the IT infrastructure to host, maintain, and ensure security and confidentiality of the database that will contain data on all business entities of India.
Any business sentiment or outlook survey done by the MoSPI will be a first for a government ministry, although the RBI does conduct multiple surveys of businesses, including an industrial outlook survey of the manufacturing sector and one relating to its order book, inventory, and capacity utilisation. The central bank also conducts a services and infrastructure outlook survey. However, any sentiment or outlook survey held by MoSPI from the proposed business register will likely have a much larger sample size than the RBI’s surveys, which see responses from fewer than 1,500 companies.
As per the presentation made at the two-day MoSPI workshop, the business register will contain details about an entity’s nature of activity, location, demographic, and “stratification parameters” such as number of employees and turnover, among others. The register is expected to form the “backbone” of the Integrated Official Business Statistics, which will be a centralised data platform. Access to the platform will be tiered – aggregated for the public, detailed for policymakers, and controlled for researchers.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
