📊 Economy & FinanceMAINS · GS3.1

NSO launches first survey of services-sector firms

ASISSE becomes India's first official annual survey of incorporated services-sector enterprises — the missing piece in the map of the non-agricultural economy.

What happened

The National Statistical Office (NSO) has launched the first-ever Annual Survey of Incorporated Services Sector Enterprises (ASISSE), fieldwork beginning April 2026.
The reference period of this maiden edition is the financial year 2024-25, and the survey spans all States and Union Territories.
It will canvass more than 1.21 lakh enterprises, drawn as a sample from the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) database.
NSO has released a companion explainer, "Know Your Survey: A User Guide to ASISSE", to orient respondents and data users.
Data are collected through a secure web-based portal, under the legal cover of the Collection of Statistics Act, 2008.
ASISSE completes a trio of annual enterprise surveys — alongside the long-running ASI (registered manufacturing) and the newer ASUSE (unincorporated sector) — giving India, for the first time, an annual official read on its formal, incorporated services firms.

Background & context

For decades, India's statistical system has measured its factories with care but watched its largest economic engine — services — through a thinner, more scattered lens. The services sector now contributes more than half of India's gross domestic product, yet there has never been a dedicated, recurring, official enterprise-level survey of the incorporated (company-form) firms that dominate trade, transport, IT, finance, hospitality, education and health. ASISSE is the National Statistical Office's answer to that gap.

The conducting agency, the National Statistical Office (NSO), sits under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) — the nodal ministry for the country's official statistics. NSO is the body that runs India's flagship statistical operations: the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the Annual Survey of Industries, and the large-scale National Sample Surveys. ASISSE is the newest addition to that suite and the first built specifically for incorporated services firms.

To understand where ASISSE fits, it helps to see the three-part architecture the government is assembling for the non-agricultural economy. The oldest leg is the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), the principal source on India's registered (factory-sector) manufacturing, run continuously since the 1950s under the Collection of Statistics framework. The second leg, of much more recent vintage, is the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), which captures the vast informal, unincorporated, non-agricultural sector (excluding construction) — the proprietorships and partnerships, the small workshops and own-account enterprises that employ the bulk of India's non-farm workforce. ASISSE is the third and final leg: it covers the incorporated services firms — entities that have taken corporate legal form. With all three running, policymakers can, in principle, stitch together a near-complete annual picture of output, employment, fixed assets and value added across manufacturing and services, formal and informal.

The release frames the launch in exactly these terms: ASI for registered manufacturing, ASUSE for the unincorporated non-agricultural sector, and now ASISSE for incorporated services — "together these three surveys provide a holistic view of the non-agricultural economy."

The legal scaffolding matters too. ASISSE is conducted under the Collection of Statistics Act, 2008, the same statute that underpins the ASI and ASUSE. That Act gives statutory force to a statistical survey: it obliges respondents to furnish information and protects the confidentiality of the data they share. The Act was strengthened by an amendment in 2017 and was again touched by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, the government's wider exercise to decriminalise minor offences and rationalise penalties across laws. Anchoring ASISSE in this statute is what lets NSO compel responses from the surveyed firms and assure them that company-level returns will be used for statistical purposes alone.

For Prelims

Full form: ASISSE = Annual Survey of Incorporated Services Sector Enterprises.
Conducting body: National Statistical Office (NSO), under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).
First edition reference period: FY 2024-25; fieldwork from April 2026; coverage of all States and UTs.
Sampling frame: the GSTN (Goods and Services Tax Network) database — the survey draws its universe of firms from GST registrations.
Scale: more than 1.21 lakh enterprises to be surveyed in the first round.
Who is covered: corporates registered under the Companies Act (1956 / 2013) or the Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) Act, 2008 — i.e., the incorporated, company-form services firms.
Sectors mapped: trade, transport, hospitality, IT, education and health, among other services.
Legal basis: conducted under the Collection of Statistics Act, 2008 (amended in 2017 and again via the Jan Vishwas Act, 2023), which makes furnishing data a statutory obligation.
Mode: data collected through a secure web-based portal; a companion guide, "Know Your Survey: A User Guide to ASISSE", accompanies the launch.
The trio it completes: ASI (registered manufacturing) · ASUSE (unincorporated non-agricultural sector, excluding construction) · ASISSE (incorporated services).
Macro anchor: the services sector contributes more than half of India's GDP.

For UPSC: ASISSE = India's first official annual survey of the incorporated services sector, run by NSO under MoSPI, sampled from the GSTN database, reference year FY 2024-25. It is the third leg of the non-agricultural trio: ASI (manufacturing) + ASUSE (unincorporated) + ASISSE (incorporated services).

What ASISSE is NOT: It is not a survey of manufacturing — that is the ASI's job. It is not the survey of the informal or unincorporated sector — that is ASUSE, which deliberately excludes construction. ASISSE does not cover unincorporated proprietorships or partnerships in services; its universe is firms that have taken corporate form (Companies Act or LLP Act). It is also not a household survey like the PLFS or the Consumer Expenditure Survey — it is an enterprise survey, with the firm, not the household, as the unit. And it does not use the Economic Census or a fresh business register as its frame; it draws on the GSTN tax database, which ties the statistical system to the GST administrative ecosystem.

The full set, for "how many / match the pairs" questions. Keep these official enterprise and household surveys distinct and remember the conducting agency (NSO/MoSPI) and the unit of each: ASI — registered manufacturing, enterprise unit, oldest of the three. ASUSE — unincorporated non-agricultural enterprises (excluding construction), enterprise unit. ASISSE — incorporated services enterprises, enterprise unit, newest, GSTN-framed. Alongside these enterprise surveys, NSO also runs the household-based PLFS (labour force) and the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey. The defining contrast for the trio is the form of the firm: registered factory (ASI) vs unincorporated informal (ASUSE) vs incorporated services (ASISSE).

Why it matters

The significance of ASISSE lies in a long-standing measurement asymmetry. India built a sophisticated apparatus to count its factories at a time when manufacturing was treated as the spine of modernisation. But the economy that actually emerged is services-led: more than half of GDP, and a disproportionate share of high-productivity, export-earning, urban formal employment, now sits in services — IT and IT-enabled services, finance, professional and business services, transport and logistics, health and education. Measuring that engine with annual, firm-level rigour has been the missing capability.

Without an annual incorporated-services survey, estimates of services-sector value added, fixed-capital formation, employment and growth had to lean on less frequent benchmarks, corporate filings of uneven coverage, and indirect indicators. ASISSE addresses this by giving national accounts statisticians a recurring, enterprise-level source to revise and validate the services component of GDP — improving the accuracy of one of the most consequential numbers the state produces. The choice of the GSTN database as the sampling frame is itself notable: it knits the statistical system into the GST administrative trail, potentially producing a more current and comprehensive universe of formal firms than an ageing business register could. This is part of a broader shift toward using administrative and digital-tax data to strengthen official statistics. The problem ASISSE addresses, in short, is informational: a state that cannot measure its largest sector at firm level cannot calibrate industrial, labour, skilling, credit or trade policy for that sector with confidence.

For Mains

Data

In any answer on the structure of India's economy or the dominance of services, ASISSE supplies a fresh, examinable data point — services now exceed half of GDP, and India has just launched its first annual official survey (FY 2024-25 reference) of the more than 1.21 lakh incorporated services enterprises that anchor that share.

Exemplification

ASISSE is a concrete example of the state strengthening its statistical and data infrastructure — using the GSTN administrative database as a sampling frame to plug a recognised gap, illustrating how digital-tax data can be repurposed to improve official statistics.

Problematisation

The launch itself is an admission of a gap: until 2026, India lacked any annual official enterprise survey of its incorporated services firms even as services crossed half of GDP — a useful hook for answers on weaknesses in India's economic data ecosystem.

Way-forward

Completing the ASI–ASUSE–ASISSE trio is a model way-forward step: a holistic, three-survey architecture for the non-agricultural economy that lets policymakers measure formal and informal, manufacturing and services, on a comparable annual basis.

Deploys into: structure and growth of the Indian economy (GS3.1) · the rising weight of the services sector · strengthening India's statistical and data systems for evidence-based policy.

Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation · 2026-04-06 · PRID 2249336 · PIB source ↗