  For about 125 items of food, the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) schedule
of the Indian National Sample Survey asks the interviewer to obtain both
quantity and value of household consumption during the reference period from
the respondent. This would appear to put a great burden on the respondent. But
it is likely that the price usually paid is almost the same within each first
stage unit (fsu). The present work proposes a new sampling scheme to estimate
demand elasticities of essential food items. While the conventional sampling
method used in practice (e.g. in NSS consumer expenditure survey) involves
seeking price information from many households sampled from a fsu, the proposed
procedure involves only one household chosen randomly from every fsu for price
data collection and thus requires much less interview burden. Using unit
records for vegetable items in the NSS's 2011-12 CES, our results show that in
spite of requiring much less data, the new scheme captures the household food
consumption behavior as precisely as before.
