Consumption in India, and whether it is growing or shrinking, has been a hot topic in the stock market community lately. Investors have been trying to decipher what the aam consumer is up to, from the sound-bytes of listed companies.
However, just as the seven blind men could not picture an elephant from its tusk, trunk or ears, we cannot get a big-picture view of consumption by looking at what individual companies selling paints, bread or noodles are telling us. This calls for macro data.
Just before New Year, the National Statistics Office (NSO) published the results of its latest Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), which visited 2.61 lakh households pan-India to collect data on their consumption spends between August 2023 and July 2024. HCES is one of the largest consumer surveys in India, used to decide weights in the CPI basket and the base year for GDP. It is thus a credible source of macro insights on consumption.
In the past, HCES was conducted every five years….
