A recent report by Asian Development Bank says “0.0009% of India earns more than 10,000 Rs a month”. As a student of market research, it took no time for me to reject the report. A highly irresponsible act by ADB, published by TOI on 23rd August, 2010.
Mr. S.V. Godbole, a researcher and professor by profession (for more than 40 years) states “reliability” and “validity” are the two most important aspects of a research report. Also, if a researcher feels that the result of report goes against common sense and common belief, one must reconsider the survey, as the sample might not be the correct representative of population (Random Sampling Error).
As per report 0.0009% of Indian population earns more than 10,000 Rs monthly, which means out of 110 Cr people – 9,90,000 earn more than 10,000 Rs monthly. Lets round it off to 10,00,000 (10 lakhs).
I didn’t need to calculate this while reading the article and the first thing that struck my mind was the number of employees in Indian Railways are 1.6 million = 16 lakhs (2008 data) with minimum basic salary of 8,500 Rs which becomes around 18,000 Rs monthly (including HRA, DA etc).
The IT giant, TCS alone employees 1,60,000 Indian employees – 95%of which are engineers. Infosys – 1,14,000. Wipro – 1,12,000 (Source-Wikipedia). IT industry employees more than 15 lakh employees in India. The minimum salary paid by any IT company is 10,000 Rs.
Do we need to go forward to Govt employees, Aviation Industry, Automobile and other manufacturing industries to reject this report. 
Also, lets consider this, another report by ADB says that 29% India has Urban Population. Yes, its the same website of Asian Development Bank. Wikipedia says, India has huge urban population, second only to China which is one of the major driving factors to FDIs in these countries.
A country growing at 8.5% GDP growth year on year on regular basis from several years, its easy to relate that people of country are making money and pillars on SMEs and MMEs.
While writing this, I went through many reports by different agencies and none complementing the other. Infact, none of these reports are even close to any of others.
Don’t know what they are up to. We must file an RTI about the amount of money invested in the research of such validity (and whom were they trying to please with the made up report.)
Follow these links
http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Country=India/Salary
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/How-many-poor-does-India-have/articleshow/5446825.cms
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/indi-a02.shtml
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