Just what is India’s unemployment rate?

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New Delhi: Every month as the US economy has slipped further towards recession, the rate of job cuts has been the loudest indicator. The US unemployment rate for August and September stood at 6.1% and at 6.5% for October. However, as the Indian economy has slowed down on its rapid growth rate, from 9% to an expected 7% plus in 2008-09, there are no corresponding figures from the job market to tell the downturn story.

Sample this: The latest Government of India job data is four years old. The NSS 62nd round, published in January 2008 for the year 2005-06, deals with data as old as July 2005 to June 2006. Moreover, in place of clearly mentioning the exact status of employed and unemployed population, it hides behind jargons like “usually status” (regular employment), “current weekly status” (weekly employment) and “current daily status” (daily labour). The figures are confusing too. It says the number of persons/person days worked per 1,000 persons/person-days as per the usual status, current weekly status and current daily status was 549, 524 and 491, respectively, for males, 310, 257 and 203, respectively, for females.

Besides the NSSO survey, other source of data are employment exchanges, which fail to represent the actual number of job seekers. As on December 31, 2005, approximately 3.93 crore people were waiting for jobs compared with 4.05 crore as on December 31, 2004. On an average, approximately 50-55 lakh job seekers are registering with employment exchanges per year from the last few years. The gravity of the situation can be judged from the fact that India’s labour force totals to approximately 40 crore, which is 10 times of the number registered in the exchanges.

One major headache for the government in the data collection exercise. Unlike West, there is no one place from where the statistics can be collected. Also, in countries like the US and the UK, there is an unemployment insurance for every unemployed individual registered. However, in India, people usually do not get themselves registered as there is no extra incentive. “In a country like India where there is no such facility for unemployment insurance, why would anybody go to the employment exchange. In such a situation how can we get unemployment data when there is no structure for it?” says Ficci secretary-general Amit Mitra.