Centre bats for timely data on employment

Stressing on the importance of timely and reliable data on employment, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday directed the Prime Minister's Office and concerned Ministries to come up with a solution to fill this long-standing gap in the country's statistical architecture.

To this regard, a task force has been created under the chairmanship of the Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog Dr. Arvind Panagriya with Labour Secretary Satyavati, Secretary Statistics Dr. T.C.A. Ananth, Pulak Ghosh of NITI Aayog and Manish Sabharwal, Member-Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Board as members.

The task force will recommend solutions which can be implemented in a time bound manner. The Prime Minister has directed that this task be expedited so that policies on employment can be formulated with a proper appreciation of impacts, based on credible data.

India suffers from a lack of reliable, timely data on employment which has made it difficult for policy makers and independent observers to assess the extent of employment generation at different points of time. Some data is collected and published by certain agencies including the Labour Bureau, but the coverage is very small.

The Labour Bureau data covers only a few sectors and the methodology is not based on updated panel of survey respondents. The net result has been that both policy making and analysis are conducted in a data vacuum.