Annual Health Survey Data Management System

Client: Office of the Registrar General, India (Census of India), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

Project Description : The Annual Health Survey (AHS) was conceived during a meeting of the National Commission of Population held in 2005 under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister wherein it was decided that “there should be an Annual Health Survey of all districts which could be published / monitored and compared against benchmarks”.

The responsibility of the project has been entrusted to the Office of the Registrar General, India on behalf of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare in view its expertise in handling the Sample Registration System, one of the largest demographic surveys in the world.

Keeping in view the mammoth size of the sample, it was a conscious decision of the Government to initially confine the survey to the 284 districts (as per 2001 Census) of the 8 Empowered Action Group States (Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Rajasthan) and Assam for a three year period starting from 2010-11. These 9 high focus States with relatively high fertility and mortality account for about 48 percent of the total population in the country.

A representative sample of 20,694 statistically selected Primary Sample Units (PSUs -Census Enumeration Blocks in case of urban areas and villages or a segment thereof in case of larger villages in rural areas) based on 2001 Census has been drawn from these AHS States which would cover about 18 million population and 3.6 million households each year. However, during the Base-line Survey, a total of 20.1 million population and 4.14 million households have actually been covered.

The Baseline Survey in all the nine AHS States was carried out during July 2010 to March 2011 and four Schedules, in all, were administered. These are:

  1. House-listing Schedule,

  2. Household Schedule,

  3. Woman Schedule and

  4. Mortality Schedule.

Centralized System of Data Management is developed and managed using a standard Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) along with custom-built software developed for various functionalities like Data Import & Validation, Error list generation and feedback to Survey Agencies, Reports Generation, Master Data Management, User Management, etc.,