Working with the ASI: A Data Guide

Megha Patnaik & Smriti Bansal

The definitive guide to downloading, cleaning, and harmonizing India’s Annual Survey of Industries. Each post covers one piece of the puzzle — by the end, you’ll have a complete pipeline from raw files to a clean panel of 390,000 factories.


# Title Status
1 Getting the data: how to actually download ASI microdata (it’s easier than you think) Coming soon
2 Inside the questionnaire: what does India ask its factories? Coming soon
3 The two ASIs: why census and sample sector matter and most people get it wrong Coming soon
4 Why your ASI aggregates don’t match the government’s: a guide to multipliers Coming soon
5 Tracking a factory through time: the nightmare of ASI identifiers Coming soon
6 When industries change names: surviving three NIC concordances Coming soon
7 What do Indian factories actually produce? Decoding the products block Coming soon
8 Employment variables: workers, employees, contract labour, and mandays Coming soon
9 Wages and compensation: what’s in the emoluments block Coming soon
10 Coal, diesel, and electricity: parsing the fuel block Coming soon
11 Inputs and outputs: raw materials, gross output, GVA, NVA Coming soon
12 Making it real: which deflators to use and why it matters more than you think Coming soon
13 How much capital does an Indian factory have? Building capital stock from scratch Coming soon
14 Three states that appeared overnight: handling India’s 2000 bifurcations Coming soon
15 The district that split seven ways: geographic harmonization Coming soon
16 The night the taxes changed: what GST did to the data Coming soon
17 Demonetisation in the data: spotting the red flags Coming soon
18 The missing factories: what COVID did to the ASI Coming soon
19 One script to rule them all: the complete ASI cleaning pipeline Coming soon

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