Too 'shy' to tell: 95% refuse to disclose income, taxes

NSO pre-test warns of non-response risks for pan-Indian survey

- SHIVA RAJORA

Indians are too “shy” to disclose their salary details, income from financial assets, income-tax (IT) paid, and expenditure on jewel-lery, among other things, according to a pretesting exercise conducted forthe draft schedule of the National Household Income Survey by the National Statistics Office (NSO).

The pretesting exercise — a standard practice in large-scale socioeconomic surveys to identify issues related to clarity, flow, and structure of survey instruments before final field deployment — showed that nearly 95 per cent of respondents were reluctant to divulge details about income from different sources. A similar proportion of respondents also refused to answer questions about IT paid.