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In the context of the recent debates and discourse on the current level of joblessness of the Indian economy, it is imperative to highlight that the situation is in fact a result of discontinuing the employment-unemployment surveys (EUS) conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) as well as the Annual Employment-unemployment surveys conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Employment (MOLE). Such discontinuations have created a situation of conjectures and speculations on the level of employment-unemployment, which do not augur well for any economy that was reeling under a lack of growth of employment till the last time similar data were available. It is in this context that the government needs to be reminded about the importance of the NSSO-EUS, the purpose it served and therefore the need to reinstate the surveys and plug the data gap on one of the most important macroeconomic indicator of a growing economy.

The NSSO-EUS, like all the other NSSO surveys embodied the idea with which the organization was instituted in 1950 by Professor Mahalanobis, widely regarded as the father of Indian statistics. His vision for the organization was to obtain and quantify comprehensive information on an annual basis on the socio-economic, demographic, sectoral and other profiles of the country, both at the national and state levels. Thus NSSO developed a methodology based on multi-stage, multi-subject and multi-purpose cross-sectional surveys, conducted annually for some and five-yearly for others (such as EUS and consumer expenditure) and covers a wide range of subjects. The data are collected and disseminated by NSSO. Researchers and organizations ranging from the ILO, World Bank and the erstwhile Planning Commission of India to academic and private institutions have been using these data extensively. The data have been used to publish in peer-reviewed journals, as well as news articles and other media.

The first nation-wide comprehensive survey on employment, unemployment and labourforce was conducted in the 9^th round (May-November 1955) of the NSSO. These surveys were regularly carried out upto the 17^th round in the rural sector and 22^nd round in the urban sector with different concepts and approaches tried in different rounds making the comparability of data difficult and limiting the validity of long term trends. Based on the recommendations of the Committee of Experts on Employment Estimates set up by the Planning Commission in 1969 (Dantwala Committee), the NSSO standardised the concepts and definitions of labour force, employment and unemployment, which were then adopted in quinquennial surveys (large sample sizes of over 100,000 households) on employment and unemployment which have been conducted regularly since 1972-73 (27^th round) in rural and urban areas. This first quinquennial survey made a marked departure from the earlier surveys conducted by the Census and NSSO in terms of procedure and content. The concepts and procedure followed in this survey were based on the above-mentioned recommendations of standardization and drew a lot from the contemporary global discourse on strengthening the databases of the employment and unemployment estimates. India adopted and implemented some of the most important resolutions passed by the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in the 1970s and thereafter, thus setting the stage for building a rigorous, comprehensive and globally comparable employment-unemployment data system.

The quinquennial surveys served as an extensive source of information pertaining to not only the levels of labourforce participation rates, work participation rates and unemployment rates, but have provided rich information on the levels of under-employment, different categories of workers, their living conditions and contractual status (self-employed or wage employed and their types), level of wages and earnings, occupational structures, status of informal labour and several other indicators of the quality of the workers and the non-workers. These surveys remained a substantial source of employment data disaggregated across religious and social groups as well as by the socio-demographic trends, for the past 42 years. In all, there have been a total of ten rounds of these surveys which provide validated and internationally comparable long term statistics pertaining to the Indian labour markets.

Albeit, the NSSO survey architecture and the sampling designs are complex and technical and are not user-friendly to the general public. However, the purpose with which it was designed in order to be as representative as possible, primarily catered to experts and thus served its ends adequately. Some of the most complex surveys such as the EUS would also be the ones supplying the minutest details of labour market situation in India. The sampling methodology adopted by the NSSO is described in detail in each of its reports which emphasizes the rigour of the methodology. Hence the expertise required for extracting, reading and interpreting the raw unit level NSSO figures have also remained limited over a long period of time. However, in the last few years several initiatives in the form of workshops by experts for students, researchers, practitioners and others, online resources were created to facilitate the interpretation of this data, which increased its uptake substantially.

The NSSO data are also highly validated. This is because first, the process ensures that the fieldwork for the national sample is carried out by teams of experienced and highly trained investigators from the Field Operations Division (FOD) of the NSSO. Second, each state conducts a parallel survey, supervised by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics. This survey uses a larger sample size and the sample overlaps with that of the nationally commissioned survey. Third, the FOD scrutinizes each questionnaire for logical correctness and the questionnaires found to be invalid are surveyed again. These steps ensure the validity of the survey and thus make the NSS the most valuable source of information on India’s economic and social parameters that are of critical importance to policy-makers and researchers.

The NSSO data have also been criticized on several grounds such as the estimated size of the population.  In NSSO-EUS, it has always been on the lower side and hence even for the quinquennial rounds the data have been criticized to be inadequate for enabling an in-depth analysis at the lowest classification of industries or occupations. The data are not completely free from the errors of identification, enumeration and tabulation (https://www.epw.in/author/sona-mitra). These critical examinations of the NSSO data have in fact led to major improvisations and corrections in revising the sample methodology which in turn made the database more robust and reliable. The methods also underwent changes in altering the questions of the survey schedules so as to adopt, accommodate and enable detailed information pertaining to the Indian labour markets in the context of the rapid global changes over the period. Properly extracted and tabulated, NSSO-EUS helped immensely in the analysis of trends and also in the evaluation of the impact of government interventions. The NSSO-EUS data has been a dynamic process evolving steadily over time to recognize the important issues for analysing the structure of the Indian labour market. The NSSO under the MOSPI, with its years of experience and expertise have been leading the initiatives effectively.

The sudden scrapping away of such surveys and discontinuing a source of extensive information on important economic and social parameters, based on grounds of certain limitations of sampling adequacy, periodicity and timeliness - i.e. limitations which were easier to overcome rather than discard entirely, comes as an act of ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’ and create an atmosphere of uninformed discourses on joblessness. In such a situation, it becomes absolutely important to reinstate the household surveys conducted by the NSSO and make the figures public at the earliest.

 

 

This is an abridged form of an article published by the author at http://www.vikalp.ind.in/2018/08/employment-unemployment-statistics-in.html. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of CBGA. You can reach Sona Mitra at sona@cbgaindia.org.