India's Household Wealth Distribution Data: A Critical Assessment

6 The Distribution of Household Wealth in India

“…The robustness of these findings is, of course, a function of the reliability of the data on which they are based, and a number of caveats in this regardwhich will not be systematically repeated here-are available in the paper by Subramanian and Jayaraj (2006). Despite these difficulties, it is expected that the findings will reveal certain broad patterns and relationships which it would be difficult to reject out of hand.…”

“…Section 2 describes the principal features of the data available in the five surveys mentioned earlier. A separate paper by Subramanian and Jayaraj (2006) discusses certain difficulties which are encountered in the use of these data, and these difficulties are summarized, in a drastically abbreviated version, in the present paper-in fact, Section 2 of the present paper is, substantially, a reproduction of Sections 1 and 3 of Subramanian and Jayaraj (2006). Subject to these qualifications, Section 3 presents some findings from the five surveys, with a particular emphasis on the last two (1991-92 and 2002-03) surveys.…”

“…The size classification of households by value of asset-holdings is variable across the surveys-a fact which (as noted in Subramanian and Jayaraj 2006) has certain implications for the over-time comparability of inequality indices computed from grouped data. The numbers of size classes in the 1961-62, 1971-72, 1981-82, 1991-92 and 2002-03 surveys are, respectively, seven, eleven, eight, ten and ten; and the size class intervals are also variable across the surveys.…”

“…In Subramanian and Jayaraj (2006), certain difficulties that are likely to be faced by a researcher in using these data are appraised. We would like to suggest that, apart from being of possible independent interest, the paper just cited is an important guide to the caution with which findings based on the survey data must be interpreted.…”

“…A very quick summary of Subramanian and Jayaraj (2006) would highlight the following features of the data. First, it is likely that the extent of debt, particularly in the more recent surveys, is under-estimated.…”