Abstract
The pursuit of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in India is particularly challenging given the country’s vast population and pronounced socioeconomic disparities. Although extensive research addresses specific healthcare areas, contemporary data on citizens’ healthcare access, quality, and preferences to inform UHC design are lacking. To bridge this gap, the Lancet Commission on a Citizen-Centred Health System for India conducted a Citizens Survey from November 2022 to April 2023, interviewing respondents in person in 50,000 randomly selected households across 125 districts in 29 Indian states and Union Territories. The survey comprised 141 questions covering healthcare utilization, experiences, costs, satisfaction, delivery preferences, insurance coverage, willingness to pay, health information behaviors, technology use, aspirational health norms, and electoral attitudes towards health. The survey had a high participation rate (98%) and a low non-response rate (9.5%), 70% of households were rural, 56% of respondents were male, 79% were Hindu, and 39% identified as Scheduled Caste or Tribes. The data aim to inform citizen-centric reforms, advancing a UHC responsive to India’s diverse population needs.
Data availability
The dataset and dictionary are available at Harvard Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/M1DFBO19.
Code availability
The code for cleaning, recoding, and analysis is provided in the supplement and will be made publicly available at the time of publication of this article. The code was written and run in Stata version 16.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the other members of our Scientific Advisory Committee (Gagandeep Kang, Sapna Desai, and Atul Gupta) for their guidance in formulating the study. We thank the Commissioners of the Lancet Commission on a Citizen-Centred Health System for India for their feedback on the survey and analysis. We thank the researchers who worked on the formulation of the survey, data collection, and analysis, including Dipanwita Sengupta, Sandul Yasobant, Vinod Joseph, Hasna Ashraf, Sanghamitra Sengupta, and Alok Vajpayi. We thank the DRS team for the data collection. We express our gratitude to CMC Vellore and Infosys Limited for the support. Most importantly, we are deeply grateful to all the respondents of this survey who generously shared their time and information with us to create this dataset. Funding for this study was provided by a grant from Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India.
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A.K. conceptualized the manuscript. A.K. and S.Z. drafted the manuscript. V.P., S.V.S., S.K., S.B. and S.C. conceptualised and designed the survey. V.P. and S.V.S. guided the development of the manuscript. D.R. and M.K.C. led the data collection and quality assurance. S.Z. and S.K.S. led the data cleaning and data preparation, with contributions from J.M. and P.C. All authors critically reviewed the manuscript and guided its finalization. All authors approved the final manuscript as submitted and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work. All authors had access to the data and contributed to writing the manuscript.
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Kalita, A., Zadey, S., Shukla, S.K. et al. The Citizens Survey 2022-23: a household-level dataset on Universal Health Coverage in India. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06775-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06775-6
