Labour bureau worker crunch: Quarterly job survey in danger

The bureau has written to the union labour and employment ministry, seeking permission to stop its quarterly survey on ‘the effect of economic slowdown on employment in India’, saying it does not have enough people to carry out the exercise.

The request by the labour bureau comes at a time when its latest survey for the quarter ended June 2012 showed that employment generation in eight key manufacturing and services sectors slumped to its lowest in four quarters.

“We have written to the labour ministry asking it to discontinue the quarterly surveys as we do not have the required manpower for this. We are already coming out with annual employment and unemployment surveys that take up our time and also provide data on all sectors,” a senior labour bureau official told The Indian Express.

The labour ministry had started the quarterly survey in 2009 to get quick estimates of the impact of the global financial slowdown on the Indian workforce in nine key sectors. Until then, the only official countrywide statistics on employment were available every five years when the national sample survey organisation released employment and unemployment data.

The Chandigarh-based labour bureau contends that it has a vacancy of over 25%. The bureau had advertised for field investigators on a contract basis even to conduct the

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