NCAER rural household survey

The project will build on the AID-funded Additional Rural Income Survey (ARIS), a multi-purpose, three round (1968-70) survey of 5,000 households in 250 rural villages throughout India. ARIS was designed to trace the impact of the introduction of high yielding cereals on production, incomes, employment, poverty, income distribution, expenditures, savings, and investment. Later in 1970-71, a schedule on pregnancy histories and access to family planning was added in order to relate economic data to demographic variables. The new survey will use 2,500 families who participated in ARIS and 2,500 new families, all from the same 250 ARIS villages. The orginal survey schedule for household economic data will be used, but the demographic schedule will be revised and a new schedule on time allocation of household members will be added. Survey results will be available in 1983 and will permit both longitudinal analysis (comparisons between 1968-71 and 1982) and cross sectional analyses (comparisons among households in the 1982 sample). Longitudinal analysis will stress trends during the 1970"s in poverty, income distribution, land ownership and use, and the relative position of cultivators, agricultural laborers, and non-agricultural laborers. Cross sectional analysis will provide a detailed assessment of current economic and demographic relationships, particularly of patterns in female labor force participation and fertility. NCAER will limit its own analytical efforts to topics which are especially relevant to planning rural development programs. Survey results will be presented in a series of technical seminars; a final report will be published in book form in 1984-85.