Authors are working in the Central Statistics Office. Views expressed in the paper are the personal views of the authors and not of CSO. Authors are grateful to Sh Ashish Kumar, ADG, NAD and Shri Naresh Kumar, former Director and consultant NAD for their guidance in the preparation of this paper; and to the NDCU unit of NAD for sharing the annual reports of public sector companies
Information on average service lives of assets is required for estimation of Consumption of Fixed Capital (CFC), using the perpetual inventory method. However, no explicit life table of fixed assets is currently available in India. Based on extensive discussions held by Central Statistics Office with several agencies, the requisite information on average service lives of various assets have been obtained and are in use in the national accounts. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyse the annual financial statements of the public sector companies for the year 2011–12, where straight line method of depreciation is used, to obtain an alternate set of estimates of average service lives of assets for broad industry group classification of National Accounts. A comparison of these estimates is then made with the average service lives presently in use in the national accounts series with base 2004–05.
Service lives, capital stock, consumption of fixed capital
