Unemployment rate doubled since 2011: Report

Unemployment rate in India has doubled in eight years to 2018 as 50 lakh lost jobs in last two years beginning with demonetisation in November 2016, a new research by a privately run university said.

A report by Azim Premji University researchers led by Amit Basole said with the government not releasing results of the new high-frequency Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), they used data from the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIC-CPDX) to understand the employment situation between 2016 and 2018.

"Unemployment, in general, has risen steadily post 2011. Both the PLFS and the CMIE-CPDX report the overall unemployment rate to be around 6 per cent in 2018, double of what it was in the decade from 2000 to 2011," the report posted on the university's website said.

India's unemployed, it said, were mostly the higher educated and the young.

"Our analysis of CMIE-CPDX reveals that five million men lost their jobs between 2016 and 2018, the beginning of the decline in jobs coinciding with demonetisation in November 2016, although no direct causal relationship can be established based only on these trends," it said.

A leaked report of the periodic labour force survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) had shown unemployment at a 45-year high of more than 6 per cent in 2017-18 but the government has officially not yet released the report, saying the version reported in the media was not final.

The Azim Premji University research report said among urban women, graduates are 10 per cent of the working age population but 34 per cent of the unemployed.

The age group 20-24 years is hugely over-represented among the unemployed. Among urban men, for example, this age group accounts for 13.5 per cent of the working age population but 60 per cent of the unemployed.

"In addition to rising open unemployment among the higher educated, the less educated (and likely, informal) workers have also seen job losses and reduced work opportunities since 2016," it said. "In general, women are much worse affected than men. They have higher unemployment rates as well as lower labour force participation rates".

The report said India's labour statistics system is in transition.

The five-yearly employment-unemployment surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSS-EUS), the last of which was in 2011-12, have been discontinued. The annual surveys conducted by the Labour Bureau (LB-EUS) have also been discontinued. The last available survey in this series is from 2015.

"The government has not released the results of the new high-frequency Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the NSSO," it said adding in the absence of official survey data, numbers from the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE-CPDX) was used to understand the employment situation between 2016 and 2018.

"CMIE-CPDX is a nationally representative survey that covers about 1,60,000 households and 5,22,000 individuals and is conducted in three 'waves', each spanning four months, beginning from January of every year. An employment-unemployment module was added to this survey in 2016," the report said.

"We find that the CMIE-CPDX estimates of the labour force participation rate (LFPR) and the workforce participation rate (WPR) for men are comparable to those from the LB-EUS survey, as well as the NSS-EUS. For women, these rates differ substantially across surveys.