Your friendly postman, besides delivering letters, could soon be collecting crucial data on consumer prices, if a proposal from the Union ministry of statistics and programme implementation is accepted by the Department of Posts.
"We are waiting for the response from them (DoP)," Statistics and Programme Implementation Secretary Pranab Sen said here Monday.
Sen does not see any difficulty in implementing the proposal as collection of data on consumer prices does not require any sophisticated statistical knowledge, but literacy.
"It is very simple. As the postman goes to the village everyday, he can go to a shop and get the checklist filled. He can just enter the price," he said.
This kind of arrangement could be carried out for collecting data on consumer prices, before extending it to wholesale prices, Sen said.
These figures would then be used for calculating inflation.
To a question, he said only those would be outsourced that are not sensitive in nature. Data collection from firm, however, cannot be outsourced.