Using the Rotational Panel Data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey : A Cautionary Tale

An important aspect of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) is that it envisages collecting panel data on households from the urban areas of India. In a rotational panel structure, each set of urban households is supposed to be visited four times, before being replaced by a new set. Although it seems that the survey has been conducted according to this sampling framework, the released data have serious inconsistencies in the coding of key variables that are necessary to track households over multiple visits. An incorrect assignment of identifiers for the primary sampling units has rendered a major part of the rotational panel data not usable, especially between 2017-18 and 2018-19 rounds. Besides, unless these discrepancies are paid close attention to, one may end up with a wrongly matched panel of households for a given survey year. Some of these problems remain even in the newly released data for 2019-20. In this note, we illustrate these problems and discuss to what extent they limit the usage of the rotational panel data from PLFS