Government Sets Up Task Force for Reliable Employment Data

The government has set up a task force headed by NITI Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya to come up with a methodology to generate timely and reliable employment data. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself has initiated the process and has asked the task force to submit its recommendations at the earliest. The other members of the task force are labour secretary M. Sathiyavathy, secretary of the statistics department T.C.A. Ananth, NITI Aayog’s Pulak Ghosh and Manish Sabharwal, chairman and co-founder of staffing firm Teamlease Services Ltd.

Need

India does not have reliable data on jobs. The available data is currently outdated. The data on jobs in the informal sector which employs country’s majority of the workforce is not easliy available. Also, the data released by the Labour Bureau is restricted to the organized sector. National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data which is the most comprehensive data available on jobs is generated with a time lag.
Better data on jobs data will help policy planners assess the impact of policies on jobs and will shed light on the actual size of the informal economy

Labour Market

India’s labour market constitutes of over 470 million people. According to CRISIL, around 18 million people enter the workforce every year. As per the data with the NSSO, India had created around 59.9 million jobs between 1999-2000 and 2004-05 and created nearly two million jobs between 2004-05 and 2009-10. Between 2009-10 and 2011-12, 13.9 million jobs were created in the country.

Month: Current Affairs - May, 2017