The government has initiated a survey on the services sector aiming to get accounting data from service establishments on the lines of that provided by the manufacturing sector, a top official said on 13 June.

"The service sector survey is being carried out to validate the use of establishments as a basis for conducting regular survey on services. It will examine the availability of accounts which are used in the services survey," Chief Statistician TCA  Anant told reporters here in a briefing on the achievements of the Narendra Modi government in three years.

"The survey will examine whether services establishments are able to give us same kind of accounting data which the manufacturing establishments give. The results will give a picture if it is sustainable. We will explore the possibility of carrying out an annual survey of service sector similar to Annual Survey of Industries," he said.

Anant said that the fieldwork for the survey has been completed and the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation will indicate when the survey would be released.

The ministry has also initiated an employment survey this year which will be more regular than the previous labour surveys.

"The employment survey will give quarterly data of the job sector in the urban areas and annual data from rural areas," Union Statistics and Programme Implementation Minister DV Sadananda Gowda told reporters at the briefing.

Currently the employment data is available at an interval of five years. The ministry launched the periodic labour force survey in April this year. 

"This new survey is being tried first time. We hope the methodology and other field issues will be stabilised in a year's time. The survey will also give data on distribution of workers industry-wise as also on workers employed in informal sector," Gowda said.

The special software that has been developed by the ministry in collaboration with World Bank will make the data collection faster with improved quality.

"The traditional approach of paper schedule for filling in information has been replaced by computer-assisted personnel interviewing method. Data for labour force survey will be directly entered by field workers through special software developed in collaboration with World Bank. It will result in faster data collection and improve data quality," he added.

Anant also said that the labour survey will give estimate of labour characteristics of rural and urban areas. "Basic agenda is to make regular data on employment available. Frequency and regularity of work is what differentiates this survey from the earlier job surveys."

The labour employment survey results will come by end of 2018.