Employment Growth in India
Context:
- As they say, data is the new oil. In light of this fact, data is the new politics, especially when official data are lacking.
- Nearly all international organisations concur that India’s GDP growth, projected to reach 7%, will be the fastest among the G20 countries.
- It’s nearly a cottage industry to compare the GDP and employment figures between the final pre-Covid year of 2019 and the first post-Covid year of 2022.
- Both relative (and absolute) job growth success are equally appreciated.
- For the vast majority of economies, it is still too early to tell. There are hints, though.
- The increase in employment in the US has surprised a lot of people. Employment in the US increased slightly from its 2019 level of 150.9 million to 152 million jobs per month in 2022.
- The US GDP was 3.7% greater above the level of 2019 compared to India’s 8.4%. It is reasonable to compare to 2019, however 2020 or 2021 would not be appropriate comparisons because they both saw the effects of Covid.
Digital information on employment prospects and its outcomes:
- Despite the fact that employment is an important policy concern, India lacks statistics.
- Women’s labour force participation, income generation, employment, and fertility are all changing significantly. We are unable to determine this, however, as official data is only sporadically and very slowly given.
- The NSO launched its periodic labour force survey (PLFS) in 2017–18 with the assurance that timely quarterly employment series would be made available for urban regions and an annual all–India series would be made available after the conclusion of the July–June agricultural year.
- Unfortunately, this promise has not been kept, despite India being one of the top two economies in the world for computer software and the pioneer in financial payments technology.
- With the rise in popularity of computer tablets, worries regarding the timeliness of data input have greatly lessened, if not completely disappeared. The time between the end of survey data collection and its tabulation and publication has now decreased to under a month. However, MOSPI is having issues with the planned release of the collected and processed data (the “usual” MOSPI lag is six to nine months).
- A quarterly bulletin with survey information as well as the annual report and data for 2021–2022 are still anticipated. The most recent urban PLFS survey results, which are also available in the form of a press release, cover the months of July–September 2022.
Compared to GDP, urban employment is increasing:
- Urban employment in India expanded by a healthy 10.7% when comparing the worker participation rate for July to September 2022 with the equivalent pre-Covid period, a rate that matched the remarkable comparative growth in GDP. To evaluate the type of employment expansion since 2019 using this comparison.
- There is enough CPHS-CMIE data to compare the years before and after Covid because CMIE (the CPHS survey) has been conducting its surveys consistently since 2015 (2019 and 2022). The table presents this comparison for four age groups (>=15 years, 15-24 years, 25-64 years, and 15-64 years).
- Unofficial estimates of India’s job growth have exploded due to the lack of official data. A employment report produced by the Center for Economic Data at Ashoka University (CEDA) and CMIE is one such unofficial estimate.
- In contrast to the GDP recovery between 2019 and 2022, 14 million jobs (3.4 percent of the workforce), according to the CEDA-CMIE analysis (The Long Road to Recovery, Preeta Joseph and Raashika Moudgill), were lost between the months of January 2020 and October 2022.
- Because CMIE doesn’t release employment numbers on a monthly basis, that month is italicised.
- The monthly estimates from the three sets of data — January-April, May-August, and September-December — are combined and constructed in the CEDA-CMIE report.
- As a result, employment for those over the age of 15 declined by 14 million (or 3.4%) between January 2020 and October 2022.
- The educational landscape in India has changed significantly (the youth opting for education rather than jobs).
- Therefore, it may be said that the age range of 25 to 64 is the most “representative” of the labour market.
- However, we do so by presenting the results for each of the five categories. In stark contrast to the CEDA-CMIE assertion of a loss of 14 million employment between January 2020 and October 2022, we find that the original non-interpolated, non-synthetic CMIE statistics for the calendar years 2019 and 2022 reveal a loss of only 4.7 million for the same age range (>=15 years).
- According to the PLFS figures for urban India alone, there will be a 16 million increase between July-September 2019 and July-September 2022.
Comparing the CPHS-CMIE data to the PLFS, there is a lack of reliability:
- The validity of the CPHS-CMIE figures is called into question for more and more cogent grounds.
- According to data from the CPHS-CMIE, the female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) was 11% in 2019 and is projected to drop to 8.7% in 2022.
- According to the most recent CPHS-CMIE data, the urban FLFPR is only 6.3 percent (for September-December 2022).
- Not only for India, these estimates are the lowest ever recorded for any nation at any time in recorded history. Over three times as great as those from CMIE are the FLFPR estimates from PLFS (around 27 per cent versus 9 per cent).
- Although less so than urban female LFPR, urban male LFPR estimates from the CPHS-CMIE are problematic as well.
- The urban male LFPR for PLFS in 2022 is 68 percent, which is over 10 percentage points higher than the CMIE projection of 59.4%.
- Despite the fact that CMIE and PLFS define employment differently, it is difficult to explain such a large variance in LFPR estimates generated from the two sample surveys.
- The World Bank initially accepted and then openly rejected the CPHS-CMIE weights before developing its own weights to calculate outcomes on consumption and poverty reduction in India.
- For the uninitiated, (population) weights serve as the basis for each home survey.
- In light of the PLFS data’s delayed release, the government must consider why its own data is kept unprocessed or released gradually.
- Whatever the cause, the data are, in all actuality, lost. In this fast-paced world where policy is intended to be made, official government data that has been gathered and compiled is kept on a government computer. If the data had been gathered and made available as planned, this study and any potential allegations of job loss would not have been required.
