Poverty Recall Periods

Santhosh T Varghese
Lecturer in Economics
PM Govt. College, Chalakudy, Kerala,
India. (Affiliated to Calicut University)

Uniform Recall Period (URP) and Mixed Recall Period (MRP) are used
in the latest NSSO survey (large sample survey data) on household
consumer expenditure (NSS 61st Round), covering the period July 2004 to
June 2005. For this survey, two different consumption distributions have
been obtained.

The first one from the consumption data collected using 30-day
recall period (also known as reference period) for all the items.

The other distribution is obtained from the consumer expenditure

data collected using 365-day recall period for five infrequently purchased
non-food items, namely, clothing, footwear, durable goods, education
and institutional medical expenses and 30-day recall period for the
remaining items. Since it uses two different recall periods, it is called as
Mixed Recall Period.

As per it, with URP the poverty in India on 2004-05 was 27.5 (28 in
rural and 25.7 urban) and in Kerala it was 15%.

Recall period
Simply means it is the memory period of the respondent. When the
enumerator interviews the respondent for consumption data, he asks
about the expenditure for the last 30 days from his own memory. Earlier
it used 364 day recall period. The criticism with this methodology was
1

that it will not give accurate data as people have only a limited memory.
Hence the Uniform Recall Period for 61st round.

NSSO also used the mixed period to get an another distribution to

make the survey results compare to the previous poverty estimations.