Three years after it was junked, revamped quarterly jobs data to be released next week

Nearly three years after it junked the employment survey, the labour ministry will next week release a revamped survey aimed at estimating establishment-based employment data.

The first revised survey will reveal the number of people employed in India in April-June this year.

The revamped employment survey with wider coverage will help the government assess employment generation in the country on a quarterly basis, a senior government official told ET.

"The idea is to have official employment numbers. This will help counter some of the private data flowing in on unemployment numbers and job losses in the country," said the official, who did not wish to be identified.

The survey covers establishments with more than 10 employees across nine sectors that the government says account for 85% of India's workforce. The nine sectors include manufacturing, IT/ITeS, construction and hospitality.

As per the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the total number of employed in India in August stood at 397.8 million, 5.7 million lower than two years ago. It had estimated that 22.7 million jobs were lost during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in April-May, of which 7.8 million recovered in June, resulting in total employment in the country at 383 million by end of June.

The quarterly employment survey by the Labour Bureau, under the ministry of labour and employment, is different from the period labour force survey (PLFS) by the statistics and programme implementation ministry. PLFS is a household survey and brings out quarterly data only for urban India while cumulative data for both urban and rural comes out annually.