The Statistics Ministry is looking to hire almost 10,000 contractual workers, nearly double the current number, at a cost of nearly Rs 1,000 crore in an effort to meet the demand for rising data collection work for an ever-increasing number of surveys by the National Statistics Office’s (NSO) Field Operations Divisions (FOD).
According to tender documents, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) wants as many as 9,888 survey supervisors, survey enumerators, and administrative support staff for a period of two years and potentially a third. MoSPI has pegged the estimated bid value at Rs 968.92 crore.
“The services of outsourced manpower shall be utilised by NSO (FOD) for the conduct of field work related to its surveys including data collection, scrutiny, supervision and administrative support, etc. Further, the service of the same shall be utilised for maintaining appropriate quality control measures adopted by CQCD (Coordination and Quality Control Division),” the document said.
As per the document, MoSPI wants to hire 6,822 survey enumerators — people who will go door-to-door to collect data — and 2,510 survey supervisors. A further 556 administrative support staff are also wanted. At present, the ministry has around 5,500 contract workers whose term will end on March 31, a source said.
Data collection woes
With the attrition rate among JSOs more than 40% and the number of surveys that have to be conducted on the rise, MoSPI has had to increase its reliance on contract staff to collect data. The ministry admitted as much in a concept note last year, saying that several challenges — the unavailability of local field staff at the district level and language barriers for non-local staff — made data collection a problem.
As such, the ministry proposed to hire “local educated residents having fluency in local language…on contract basis for doing the profiling and data collection, updating etc. works”. This was part of a broader overhaul that involved renaming all contractual field staff, or Survey Enumerators, as ‘Sankhya Mitra’ and Survey Supervisors as ‘Sankhya Supervisor’.
“One cannot do justice to the job with a rudimentary or working knowledge of the local language, especially when the topic of the survey changes every year or round,” a Senior Statistical Officer told The Indian Express on the condition of anonymity. “In such cases, meaningful responses to the questions in the schedule or surveys cannot be elicited and supervised due to a lack of familiarity with the local language and cultural practices.”
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The tender documents to hire contract staff for the next 2-3 years stipulate that in case the selected contract agency deploys new workers, they “should be from the resident district as specified by concerned Regional Office”.
A ‘stopgap arrangement’
MoSPI’s plan to nearly double the number of contract staff runs counter to comments made by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance last year, when it said the ministry should not resort to these “stopgap” arrangements.
“The shortage of manpower in Field Operation Division in respect of collection & scrutiny of the data affects the quality of the data. According to the Ministry, the same is being addressed through engaging contractual manpower and training them,” the committee had said in its August 2025 report. “The Committee is of the view that this is a stopgap arrangement and does not fully address the issue. The Committee, therefore recommend the Ministry to deal with the issue of severe manpower shortage on priority basis and take concrete steps towards recruitment of regular field based staff in a time bound manner.”
The Statistics Ministry did not respond to an e-mail requesting a comment.
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As on January 1, there were more than 500 Junior and Senior Statistical Officer positions – around 12% of the total sanctioned strength – lying vacant. Junior Statistical Officers (JSO) and Senior Statistical Officers (SSO) are primarily responsible for collecting data on the ground, with JSOs doing the field work and SSOs supervising the collection of data.
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