Historically, there has been much scepticism regarding the reliability of self-declared income estimates of households.

Consumer Pyramids Household Survey takes this challenge of estimating household income reliably very seriously. Its approach in doing so is to probe deeper than is done usually into the question of income and to ask the questions repeatedly to the same households at fast frequency.

Such an approach rests on the belief that first, when asked detailed questions of income, households may be compelled to reveal information they may not do when asked an overall estimate of income and secondly, repeated questions can expose inconsistencies that arise when a household deliberately misleads about its income.

Results of this effort in the form of record-level income data on individual members and individual households is available in the Income Pyramids data set.

This database presents information on income from wages, pensions, dividends and interest of individual earning members of households. Each source of income is revealed separately. Further, the database offers income received by the household from sources that are usually not attributable to a specific individual of the household. These include private transfers, government transfers, business profits, profits from sale of assets, imputed income of home grown agricultural products used for self-consumption, lotteries & gambling, etc.

The data is sought for the four months preceding the month of the survey. And, the survey is conducted every four months. This ensures the delivery of source-wise, member-wise and household-wise income for all 12 months of a year.

Income Pyramids delivers monthly income data for its sample households from January 2014.

The approach not only helps in eliciting more reliable estimates of household income but also enables the study of seasonality of incomes, volatility of incomes, growth of incomes, changing structure of sources of incomes, and a lot more.

With Income Pyramids researchers can overcome their understandable scepticism regarding self-declared income data.

Income Pyramids provides an opportunity to examine wage rates across occupations, examine per capita incomes, examine income distribution or income inequality and a lot more.

Subscribing to People of India DX is a pre-requisite to subscribing to Income Pyramids. A join of the two database provides much greater opportunities to explore income growth, wage rates, income distribution, income inequalities across several more characteristics.