A quiet but consequential data reform is under way in India's informal economy. Union Textiles Minister Giriraj Singh announced on Tuesday, 27 October 2026 that the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) will now include dedicated questions for women entrepreneurs — and, for the first time, sector-specific questions covering handloom, powerloom and handicraft businesses.

Writing on X in Hindi, the minister said the move marks 'mahtvapurn pahal' — 'an important initiative' — toward understanding the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs and building effective policies for them. The survey will carry special questions related to women business owners as well as specific questions tailored to the needs of the handloom, powerloom and handicraft sectors, he noted, adding that this will help 'better understand the needs of these sectors, design targeted policies, and accelerate development.'

Why ASUSE data matters for India's 'invisible' textile workforce

The ASUSE, conducted by the National Statistical Office, is the primary government tool for tracking the informal economy — the vast, largely uncounted universe of unregistered, household-level businesses that form the backbone of India's traditional crafts and textiles. Previous major rounds — notably the 67th and 73rd NSS rounds — gave planners the baseline data needed to design MSME interventions stretching back more than a decade. But those surveys were not built with gender-disaggregated or sector-specific lenses sharp enough to capture what is happening inside handloom clusters in Varanasi or handicraft workshops in Kutch.

That gap matters enormously. Women make up a disproportionately large share of handloom and handicraft labour in India — often as home-based workers or micro-entrepreneurs who do not show up cleanly in standard enterprise data. Without precise data on their access to credit, technology and markets, even well-funded schemes can miss their intended beneficiaries entirely.

From the National Handloom Development Programme to a data-first approach

The Ministry of Textiles restructured the National Handloom Development Programme in 2015-16 to focus on weaver welfare and cluster development. The programme has channelled resources into training, yarn subsidies and market linkages. What has been harder to do is calibrate those interventions precisely — matching the right support to the right weaver in the right cluster — because aggregate survey data cannot capture the differential barriers women-led micro-enterprises face compared with male-owned ones.

Adding gender-specific and sector-specific modules to ASUSE is a structural fix to that problem. Granular data on female entrepreneurship in powerloom towns or handicraft belts can directly inform credit-access policies, cluster-level skilling programmes and direct-benefit transfer eligibility criteria.

What follows the announcement

The precise questionnaire additions and the implementation timeline for the referenced ASUSE round have not yet been published in official records. The real test of the initiative will come when the survey results are released and the Ministry of Textiles converts the new data into concrete scheme guidelines for women entrepreneurs in handloom and handicraft clusters across India.

Data without follow-through is just data. The sector is watching to see whether this survey redesign becomes the scaffolding for a genuine policy overhaul — or remains a well-intentioned footnote.