Recently, the data quality of the National Sample Surveys (NSS) and the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) has become the centre of discussion [1,2]. Two issues that have been raised include the overestimation of the rural population in these surveys and greater response rates in poorer wealth groups compared to the richer groups. Technically, there are concerns about the generalisability of these surveys. Politically, the argument is that together these issues bias the surveys toward depicting the country as worse off. In other words, the surveys do not capture the growth in urbanisation and accompanying wealth generation that has happened over the recent past.