Piyush Goyal shuns private sources showing high unemployment

NEW DELHI: Railways and coal minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday said there has been a significant increase in employment opportunities, but the current methods of data collection have failed to adequately capture this trend. He dismissed numbers given by private sources that showed a high level of unemployment.

Goyal told an event organised by CII that a host of new-age industries have come up which have improved the livelihood of the people without necessarily translating into a concomitant pick-up in employment as they are not getting captured in the formal payroll data.

Data generated from government employment exchanges reflects an unemployment level of 4%, he said, questioning the numbers by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), which pegged unemployment at 7.4% — a 27-month high — in December. “We don’t know where the CMIE gets its data from. While people have been talking (about it), we still do not know where or what is the extrapolation of data,” he said.

Goyal said the CMIE data was “totally at variance with” that of the government’s, which is based on data collected by the labour ministry and the Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

He said the government may look to combine data collected by industry bodies with its own to create a more robust picture of employment.