: Crisis of employment numbers #IndiaNEWS #News FACT Vs FICTION By B Sambamurthy All hell broke

Crisis of employment numbers #IndiaNEWS #News
FACT Vs FICTION
By B Sambamurthy
All hell broke loose when the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a private think tank, published the unemployment number at 8. 2%. There was the usual slugfest between the economists on both sides of the spectrum. One section dismissed this number as inaccurate and not representative, while the other raised red flags and termed this as a serious job crisis.
8% unemployment does not mean 92% of the population representing nearly one billion people are gainfully employed and are having a good life
On an impulse, I thought that employment of 92% is a good enough number for an emerging economy like India. I wondered why this ruckus on job crisis. I then bumped into a friend of mine who is a Labour economist and asked him what is this hullabaloo and red flags when over 92% are employed in a huge country like ours with over 130 crore population. In a sermonic tone, he said that 8% unemployment does not mean 92% of the population representing nearly one billion people are gainfully employed and having a good life.
Rag Pickers, People Hawking at Traffic, Odd Boy Working at Chai shop
Moderating, if not dampening, my excitement, my Labour economist friend clarified that rag pickers are also counted as employed and so also people hawking at traffic lights, the boys and girls at chai shops doing odd things, etc. Persons who work even for one hour in a week or one day in a week are also counted as employed. Over 80% of the labour force works in the informal sector and these survey/estimation exercises become that much more arbitrary or harder.
Surveys but not Census
He cautioned that these are surveys and not census. The sample size of these surveys is based on less than 1% of the workforce. There are other issues like disguised employment, seasonal employment, frictional unemployment, transitory unemployment, structural unemployment, and gender skew in favour of males. The last census was done in 2011.
A lot of dividend from the massive 900 million people in the working age bracket lies on the table ill-consumed
As an explainer, he said that I should know some key employment indicators before I start knowing and understanding the employment numbers. In a lecture mode, he started the following discourse:

Working Age

This population tells us the number of people in the working age, ie, above 15 years of age. It means a massive 900 million people in this country are in the working-age bracket. For a perspective, the entire European Union has a working age population of about 330 million.