Labour participation

Revamped PLFS data should help policymaking

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The National Statistics Office (NSO) last week released the first monthly bulletin of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), underscoring that India's official statistics are beginning to meet the demands of a fast-growing economy. It was argued by many economists and analysts that India needed high-frequency data on employment conditions. In the absence of official data, analysts used data from private sources, which were often questioned for coverage and methodology. Although not directly comparable with earlier labour statistics, owing to a change in methodology, the bulletin showed India's unemployment rate for people aged 15 and above at 5.1 per cent. The unemployment rate in urban areas stood at 6.5 per cent as against 4.5 per cent in rural areas. The data, based on the current weekly-status approach (which uses a seven-day reference period to determine employment status), showed the all-India labour-force participation rate was 55.6 per cent in April, with a sharp rural-urban divide. It also showed that the gender divide in labour-force