Surveys In India

My lecturer taught me how important a survey is for an company. It helps them to know about their public image, competitors as well as the threats and opportunities prevailing in the market. But i wonder how much successful the surveys actually are which are conducted here. No one wants to do a survey and anyways who would want  to roam around door to door in such hot and humid summer afternoon just for the sake of filling some questionnaires??? They can probably fill it themselves by giving fake responses and submit it, who's gonna check that anyway! and this is exactly what happens here.

One fine Sunday afternoon i finally decided to sit and sincerely study for my exam but my plans went down the drain with a door bell. I wondered who could it be, i mean who can come to visit us that too on a lazy Sunday afternoon!! And the surprise visitor was none other than a lady conducting survey on various telephone/cellphone network providers. And i was like "okay fine, shoot your questions". She had a huge bunch of papers and as i was analyzing them, she bombarded me with questions, and even before i could answer it she filled it and went on to another question and i was like "what the hell is she doing??" , i mean if she had to fill it own her own then why bother me? seeing my puzzled look she replied- "main jaldi jaldi kar deti hoon taki aapka time waste na ho". and she went on with the questions and finally completed it and finally took my contact details and went away.

After she went I thought how much difficult it would have been for her, to go door to door finding people to fill up the questionnaires and out of them half of whom would not even be interested and the rest half would have got got irritated because of the length of the questionnaire. May be that's the reason she said "i wont waste your time". Even i got irritated not because of the length of questionnaire but b'coz she wasn't actually taking into account what i was saying. God knows what all she has actually written in that!! For her it was about meeting the targets by filling up all the questionnaires, which i think she surely achieved, but the purpose of the company which conducted the survey was defeated completely as the data collected wasn't reliable enough!! If this is the manner in which surveys are conducted and if this is the attitude of people towards surveys, then surely no company can survive in such conditions!! We still have a long long way to go to compete with other world class countries....