Task force on employment to submit report next week

Govt says the country's unemployment rate is decreasing and employment generation has gone up

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 Saturday.

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.

Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said the employment generation data is not captured properly which the government needs to address. He said the unemployment rate in the country is decreasing and employment generation has gone up due to various schemes like Mundra Yojana and Digital India.

Asked whether the group will come out with any new employment numbers, labour secretary M Sathiyavathy said, "The task force will only give recommendations on how we should go about the survey 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 said. She claimed that 98.5 per cent of enterprises in India have less than 10 employees, which are not covered under the survey.

After the global financial crisis in 2008, the Labour Bureau had started a quarterly survey of employment in eight sectors including 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 work on new employment survey from April and is expected to release the results of labour force from December 2018.