Joblessness in the country rose to a 45-year high in 2017-18 with the unemployment rate among the labour force at 6.1%. According to the data released on a day when Modi 2.0 Cabinet took charge, 7.8% of all employable urban youth were jobless during 2017-18, while the corresponding figure for rural India was 5.3%. While the joblessness among males on an all-India basis was 6.2%, it was 5.7% in case of females.’
The government, however, sought to play down the alarming results of the National Sample Survey Orgsanisation’s (NSSO) first annual survey on employment for 2017-18 it had earlier controversially withheld from release, citing the differences in methodology, data collection and sampling design between the new survey and the previous quinquennial rounds, the latest of which pertained to 2011-12.
Statistics secretary Pravin Srivastava said, “It is a new design and a new matrix. It would be unfair to compare it with the past. I don’t want
to claim that it is 45-year low or high.”
Elaborating further, he said, “The point is that it is a different matrix. From 2017-18 onwards, you will be getting regular estimates and this (labour force survey) can be used as a base. When we change the matrix, it is very difficult to measure (compare) because there is no means to do a retrospective analysis in that year based on earlier matrix.”
However, PC Mohanan, the acting chairman of National Statistical Commission (NSC), who had quit protesting against the delay in the release of the results of the new Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), reiterated to FE that the two series were indeed comparable.
“If in the five-yearly surveys, land holdings and income levels were among the criteria for the sample households, groupings based on number of educated people in households were done in PLFS, but without any risk of excluding households without educated members. Also, the formula employed was robust enough to adjust for errors and we strictly followed the basic statistical principles of being unbiased, sufficiency (of samples), error margins, etc. So it doesn’t make any sense to me if someone says the two series are not comparable,” he said.
Pronab Sen, India’s former chief statistician, told Reuters that small businesses had been especially weak, while the unemployment rate was likely to have spiked after the country replaced the majority of its banknotes in a shock move in 2016. The PFS is meant to be annual rounds for pan-India data while there will be quarterly surveys for urban areas with reference period of one week.
The latest report is based on PLFS conducted by the NSSO from July 2017 to June 2018. The survey was spread over 7,014 villages and 5,759 urban blocks covering 1,02,113 households (56,108 in rural areas and 46,005 in urban areas) and enumerated 4,33,339 persons (2,46,809 in rural areas and 1,86,530 in urban areas).
“Estimates of the labour force indicators are presented in this report based on the usual status (ps+ss) approach and current weekly status approach adopted in the survey for classification of the population by activity statuses. The reference period for usual status (ps+ss) approach is 1 year and for current weekly status (CWS)approach, it is 1 week,” the ministry said.
In the CWS approach, unemployment among the labour force was 8.9% – 8.5% in rural areas and 9.6% in urban centres.
In February, Niti Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar had said the quarterly employment data sets for the July-December 2018 period (two quarters) were still being processed, seeking to justify the delay in release of the results of PLFS