R for India’s Public Data: A Guide to NSSO and Beyond

This book, R for India’s Public Data: A Guide to NSSO and Beyond, is a comprehensive effort to explain the twin worlds of NSSO surveys and R programming. It is crafted for students, researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners who wish to work with India’s unit-level datasets in a systematic and reproducible way. The book begins with an introduction to the history, evolution, and scope of the National Sample Survey Office, highlighting its role in shaping socio-economic policy and research. It then turns to the basics of R—installation, packages, and simple coding demonstrations—making the software accessible even for beginners. In the data preparation section, readers learn how to access NSSO datasets from official sources, interpret file structures, and read ASCII, CSV, Stata, and SPSS formats. Practical guidance is given on decoding variable labels, recoding values, and merging household- and person-level files. Subsequent chapters focus on data cleaning, validation, and wrangling, ensuring datasets are ready for meaningful analysis. The exploratory analysis section covers descriptive statistics, visualization using ggplot2, and survey design techniques with weights, strata, and PSUs. Applications span employment and unemployment (including PLFS), poverty and consumption, education, health, and the survey of unorganised enterprises, providing sector-specific illustrations. Advanced chapters explain regression, time-series, and policy evaluation through real case studies. Supported by appendices on sampling methods, Stata-to-R translation, and ready-to-use R code snippets, the book functions both as a teaching companion and a practical reference manual for anyone working with India’s public data.