Interviewer instructions
Column 6: Type of operation (for rural areas): This column will be filled in for persons belonging to the rural households only. The actual working operation performed by the persons relevant to the status codes grouped under the activity category working (i.e., status codes 11-72) will be entered in terms of codes in this column. It may be noted that for regular wage/salaried employees on leave or holiday, the 'operation' will relate to their respective function in the work or job from which he is temporarily off in view of his taking leave or holiday. Similarly for persons categorised 'self-employed' (status codes 11, 12 & 21) if they are not at work on a particular day in spite of their having work on that day, operation to be recorded will relate to the work they would have done if they had not enjoyed leisure on that day.
Although it may be theoretically possible that on a particular day of the reference week, a person may have any number of activities, the particulars relating to two activities identified on the basis of priority cum major time criterion need only be considered for making entries in this column. Thus, on a day, a person may either have only one activity with 'full' intensity or two activities with 'half' intensity for each. If the activity is pursued with intensity 'half' on a particular day, the entry will be 0.5 against that activity and if that is pursued with intensity more than ‘half’, 1.0 will be recorded against that activity in the relevant columns 7 to 13. Generally, an activity, which is pursued for more than 1 hour but less than 4 hours is considered to have been pursued with ‘half’ intensity. If it is pursued for more than 4 hours, the activity is considered to have been pursued with ‘full’ intensity. However, for some persons, less than four hours of work daily is their normal working hours for the work or profession. In such cases he will be considered to have worked with ‘full’ intensity.
The decision whether the intensity to be recorded for an activity will be 0.5 or 1.0 has to be taken by the investigating staff making careful probes into the actual situation obtaining for the person on a particular day. Mere declaration made by the informants, that less than four hours of work daily is their normal working hours for the work or profession, should not be the basis for recording the intensity as 1.0. In the case of a cultivator, a village artisan or a small trader, it should not be presumed that a few hours of work on a day, say during the lean periods of the year, is his/ her normal work, and the intensity 1.0 need not necessarily be recorded for him/her. Since this particular block of the schedule is meant for recording the information on periodical or seasonal under-utilisation of available labour time, careful probes about the nature of work performed by a person during the day has to be made before recording the relevant entries.
To illustrate, in so far as the daily activity pattern of a person is concerned, the following seven different situations can be visualized for a person on a single day:
(i) he/she may be engaged fully in one economic activity;
(ii) he/she may be engaged in two different types of economic activities;
(iii) he/she may be partly engaged in economic activity and for the rest of the day he/she may be seeking or available for work and at the same time may or may not be doing some non-economic activities;
(iv) he/she may be partly engaged in economic activity and during the rest of the day he/she is not available for work and may be doing some non-economic activities;
(v) he/she may be available for work for the entire day;
(vi) he/she may be available for work for part of the day and for the remaining part he/she may not be available for work and may be pursuing some non-economic activity and
(vii) he/she may be fully engaged in non-economic activities.
The investigator is to first ascertain the exact situation from the informant and will then record the appropriate status code or codes, as the case may be, in this column using the priority-cum-major time criterion. The relevant codes to be used for recording the status are already given. The following illustrations may be noted for general guidance.
(a) A person found to be engaged in domestic duties should not be categorised 'engaged in domestic duties' (code 92) if the person reports that he/she has also been available for work concurrently.
(b) A person engaged in regular wage/salaried employment but currently not at work will be assigned code 71 or 72 irrespective of whether he is engaged in any other 'economic’ or ‘non-economic' activity.
(c) Unpaid apprentices will be treated as 'students' while paid apprentices will be treated as employees.
(d) 'Free collection for sale' will be treated as self- employment.