Unemployment data task force to submit recommendations next week

The task force on employment data headed by NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya is likely to finalise recommendations next week, an official said on Sunday. The Prime Minister’s Office last month constituted the task force to suggest solutions for having timely and reliable employment data for policy making.

The Prime Minister had directed to complete the task expeditiously so that policies on employment can be formulated on the basis on credible data.

“The task force will be completing the recommendations in the next week,” Labour Secretary M Sathiyavathy told reporters here.

Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said the employment generation data is not captured properly for which steps need to taken by the government.

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The unemployment rate in the country is decreasing and employment generation has gone up due to various schemes like Mundra Yojana and Digital India, he said.

Asked whether the group will come out with any new employment numbers, the labour secretary said, “The task force will only give recommendations on how we should go about the survey or any other methodology to reflect the actual employment generation in the country.”

“The quarterly report that is coming out of Labour Bureau ... the sample size is very small. It covers only eight sectors. It is an enterprise-based survey covering about 10,600 enterprises. The biggest challenge is that this survey covers those enterprises that have more than 10 people.”

She claimed that 98.5 per cent of enterprises in India have less than 10 employees which are not covered under the survey and there is need to expand the survey so that the data reflects actual reality.

“The idea of the task force is to focus on these issues and ensure that we come up with some methodology wherein we come out with survey or any other way of data analytics, (where) the real situation on ground gets reflected.”

After the global financial crisis in 2008, the Labour Bureau had started a quarterly survey of employment in eight sectors including leather, textiles and information technology to gauge the impact of slowdown on jobs.

Besides, the Statistics Ministry also comes out with quinquennial employment survey. The ministry has recently started field work on new employment survey from April and is expected to release the results of labour force from December 2018.