India - Household Consumer Expenditure: NSS 38th Round, Schedule 1, January - December 1983

Household :

A group of persons normally living together and taking food from a common kitchen constitutes a household. The word "normally" means that temporary visitors are excluded but temporary stay-aways are included.Thus a son or daughter residing in a hostel for studies is excluded from the household of his/her parents, but a resident employee or resident domestic servant or paying guest (but not just a tenant in the house) is included in the employer/host's household. "Living together" is usually given more importance than "sharing food from a common kitchen" in drawing the boundaries of a household in case the two criteria are in conflict; however, in the special case of a person taking food with his family but sleeping elsewhere (say in a shop or a different house) due to space shortage, the household formed by such a person's family members is taken to include the person also. Each inmate of a mess, hotel, boarding and lodging house, hostel, etc. is considered as a single-member household except that a family living in a hotel (say) is considered as one household only; the same applies to residential staff of such establishments.

The expression 'getting two square meals a day', as is used in common parlance, conveys that the concerned person get, by and large, enough food to eat. While putting this question to the informant, it is thus presumed that the informant has a clear understanding about the meaning of it. There are equivalent phrases conveying the same meaning in regional languages. It is, therefore, important to put the proper question in the local language and record the answer given by the informant in terms of prescribed code numbers.

Care should however be taken to see that the informant is not offended with this question. Neither this question should be asked to those whose reported consumption would obviously indicate that they get enough to eat. If the informant reports that the members of the household gets two square meals a day, throughout the year, the code to be entered in the box space of this block is 1. If adequate food is available in only a few months of the year the code 2 will be noted. Code 3 will indicate that the household do not usually get two square meals a day for its members.