Yesterday, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) for the data collected during the Financial Year 2023-24. This follows the earlier survey released for the Financial Year 2022-23. The survey provides valuable insights into consumption and expenditure patterns, standards of living, and the overall well-being of households.
When the FY2022-23 survey was published, I used it as an opportunity to estimate the impact of price increases in mobile services, focusing on the expenditure patterns of households across various categories—particularly the category of consumer services excluding conveyance—for both rural and urban segments of the Indian population. Given that Indian telecom operators have varying intensities of operations across circles, I utilized circle-wise revenue data published by TRAI and the released factsheets in the HCES to estimate the effect of tariff hikes on individual operators based on their revenues from rural and urban operations.
