Informal sector GVA up 16.5%, workers by 10%

The Indian economy had 73.4 million non-farm informal sector enterprises in 2023-24, according to data published by the National Statistics Office (NSO) on Tuesday.

- Abhishek Jha

These enterprises employed 120.6 million workers, which is an increase of 10% from the same period a year ago, and produced a gross value added (GVA) of ₹18 lakh crore in nominal terms. On a per worker basis, the value added in these informal sector enterprises comes to ₹1,49,742 per year. In nominal terms, this value has increased by ₹7,973 between 2022-23 and 2023-24.

The NSO released these numbers in the factsheet for 2023-24 Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), which was conducted between October 2023 and September 2024. This is the third round of the ASUSE survey. The last two rounds were conducted between April 2021 to March 2022 and October 2022-September 2023.

When read with the overall output and employment data for the economy, the latest ASUSE results mean that 36.8% of India's non-agriculture workers are employed in these informal sector enterprises and they produce 7.8% of the non-agricultural GVA in the country. When added with employment output share of agriculture, this means that 66% of India's estimated 608 million workers produce about 24% of its total GVA.