Consumer Pyramids dx - microdata from India's largest household survey

Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, produced by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), is the world's largest household panel survey, a continuous survey of more than 174,000 households in India. CPHS revisits its entire sample in three four-month waves each year, permitting longitudinal analysis starting in January 2014. Overall, CPHS aims to get a sense of the economic well-being of households in India and changes in their well-being over time.

CMIE's CP_dx website provides downloadable public-use microdata datasets - anonymized individual questionnaire responses - for each wave of CPHS's four components:

• People of India_dx : 71 variables covering identity (gender, age, marital status, education, state of origin, religion, caste, and migration), employment (labor status, type of worker, occupation, and industry), health (health status, medication and hospitalization), financial inclusion (access to bank accounts, credit cards, health insurance, and mobile phones), and time use for work and leisure.
• Aspirational India_dx : 311 variables covering household wealth (assets, investments, and debt), amenities, and consumer sentiments.
• Income Pyramids_dx, 68 variables covering monthly household and household-member income and its composition by sources.
• Consumption Pyramids_dx, 249 variables reporting monthly household expenditures (153 categories of consumables) and weekly household expenditures (27 categories).

CP_dx provides each wave's microdata datasets in multiple formats : Stata, SPSS, SAS, R, comma-delimited CSV text, and fixed-field text. The datasets are very large. Each four-month wave of People of India_dx averages 636,763 responses for a total count of 12,735,252 responses over 20 waves (January 2014-August 2020). Monthly household-member Income Pyramids_dx datasets count an average of 631,289 responses.

An interactive codebook, or description of indicators, is provided on the CP_dx website, along with the CPHS questionnaire, and documentation on survey design, sample survival, weighting, and survey execution.

The Penn Libraries' initial Consumer Pyramids_dx subscription has been partially supported with a grant from the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics.