The cash economy is now measured by a survey each year

Economy No. 25 23 September 2026 · 2 min read

India's new GDP series, which uses 2022-23 as its base year, changes the way the cash-heavy part of the economy is measured.

Earlier, the figure for small household businesses was mostly rolled forward from an old survey, using growth rates or stand-in numbers from elsewhere in the economy, at times from listed companies. Now MoSPI builds a fresh figure every year from 2 surveys it already runs, ASUSE and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS).

But direct does not mean exact. As Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar wrote in the Economic Times on 22 September, ASUSE is still a survey.

ASUSE does not visit every tea stall, repair shop or small business. It visits a sample and scales that sample up to the whole sector. In 2025 it visited 6,70,289 businesses to stand for 7.92 crore. That is about 1 in every 118.

The method is simple enough. There is no full list of these businesses to pick a sample from, so investigators first go to 24,153 chosen villages and city blocks and write down every business they find. They then pick a sample from that list and mostly ask owners what the past month looked like. Only a few larger businesses hand over audited accounts.

The survey covers businesses that are not registered as companies, in manufacturing, trade and other services. It leaves out farming and construction, and it includes proprietorships, partnerships, co-operatives, trusts and self-help groups.

For 2025, ASUSE put the sector at 7.92 crore businesses, 12.81 crore workers and ₹19.93 lakh crore of value added, which is sales minus the cost of goods and services bought in. That is about 6.4% of everything the country produced that year. The sample was also raised about 1.5 times, taking coverage from 1 in 147 businesses to 1 in 118 and making quarterly figures possible.

So the cash economy is still not counted business by business. It is estimated each year from a fresh sample of the sector itself, instead of an old number being moved along by a growth rate borrowed from somewhere else.

That is not the sturdiest way to measure it, but it is a real improvement.

How much of the sector the 2025 round of the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) actually visited. Investigators walked into 6,70,289 firms, 0.85% of the 7.92 crore the survey estimates are out there, drawn as a sliver against a bar running the width of the page. The other 99.2% is estimated from those visits. There is no list of these firms, so investigators go to 24,153 chosen villages and city blocks, write down what they find, and mostly ask the owner about the past month. In ASUSE 2023-24 the cover was 4,98,024 visits against 7.34 crore, or 1 in 147.

What small unregistered firms add to the economy, in rupees lakh crore, across the last 3 rounds of the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE). The total rises from 15.42 in ASUSE 2022-23, to 17.97 in ASUSE 2023-24, to 19.92 in ASUSE 2025. Other services is the largest part throughout, 6.28 then 7.92 then 8.51. Trade goes 5.54, 6.24, 7.29, and gains the most in the last round. Manufacturing is the smallest, 3.61, 3.80, 4.13. Agriculture and construction are outside the survey.

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