Statsguru: Five charts explain how big is India's labour force

The size of India's labour force is likely to have reached 540 million in 2019-20.

The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for July 2019-June 2020 (2019-20) shows that in a year of severe economic slowdown, India’s labour force participation increased to 40.1 per cent of the population, compared to 37.5 per cent in the previous period. 

The worker population ratio increased from 35.3 per cent to 38.2 per cent and the unemployment rate, which is the proportion of the unemployed in the labour force, declined from 6 per cent to 5.1 per cent.

Business Standard applied these ratios for three previous rounds of PLFS — 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 — to the estimated population