The government plans to expand its new monthly gauge of services output to include education, health and public administration. An approach paper released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (Mospi) on Tuesday proposes adding the three sectors to the Index of Services Production (ISP), taking it from 19 sub-sectors to 22 and its coverage from about 60 per cent to 78.4 per cent of services gross value added (GVA).
The three sectors now proposed — public administration and defence, education, and human health activities and care activities — accounted for nearly 21 per cent of services GVA in 2024-25. Public administration and defence makes up 10.68 per cent, education 7.15 per cent, and human health and residential care 2.96 per cent.
“The overall index would be constructed by combining the existing ISP sub-indices with the newly developed sub-sectoral indices using their 2024-25 shares in services-sector GVA as weights,” said the ministry.
The ministry began compiling the ISP every month in July 2026, on a trial basis, with 2024-25 as the base year. The index currently covers 19 broad services sub-sectors and uses GST outward-supply data, banking data on loans and deposits, insurance income, and passenger and freight kilometres for transport.
“This expanded framework will enable aggregation of the sub-sectoral indices into a unified, all-encompassing Index of Services Production that provides a representative reflection of short-term movements of India’s services sector,” the ministry said.
These sectors were left out of the index so far because they are non-market, exempt from GST or mainly run by the government. Core teaching services of recognised educational institutions are exempt from GST, and so are core healthcare services such as hospital admissions and outpatient consultations. For education and health, the paper proposes measuring the public and private parts separately.
The public part would be tracked through government spending recorded in the Public Financial Management System (PFMS), mainly salaries and grants-in-aid. The private part would be tracked through UPI transaction data, using merchant category codes to identify payments to schools, colleges, hospitals, doctors and other providers.
In 2024-25, the public sector accounted for 65.61 per cent of education GVA, the private sector for 24.91 per cent and households for 9.48 per cent. In health, the shares were 42.66 per cent, 37.21 per cent and 20.12 per cent.
Public administration and defence would be measured on a sum-of-costs basis, using pay for civil servants and defence personnel together with operational expenses.
Central government data would come from PFMS, and state data from monthly State Accounts reports compiled by the Comptroller and Auditor General.
The paper also lists limitations. UPI records payments, not physical output, and it does not distinguish between public and private institutions. Government spending data can swing sharply from month to month. Monthly data on state spending on educational and health institutions is not available separately, so for now the public part of those two indices would rely only on central government data.