Official employment survey may capture migration

The ministry of statistics and programme implementation is examining changes that may need to be carried out to assess the extent of unemployment post the reverse-migration in the Periodic Labour Force Survey. The idea is to get a better sense of employment as migration from cities, post-Covid pandemic and lockdown, has been in large numbers.

NEW DELHI: India could add new parameters to the national employment-unemployment survey to assess the large-scale reverse migration taking place due to the lockdown.

The ministry of statistics and programme implementation is examining changes that may need to be carried out to assess the extent of unemployment post the reverse-migration in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS).

“We may have to expand the scope of questionnaire. The PLFS design already caters for this but we will need to see the extent to which this gets captured post migration,” said an official.

The idea is to get a better sense of employment as migration from cities, post-Covid pandemic and lockdown, has been in large numbers.

PLFS is India’s first computer-based survey, which gives estimates of key employment and unemployment indicators like the labour force participation rates, worker population ratio, proportion unemployed and unemployment rate in rural households annually and the urban ones on a quarterly basis.

The PLFS results give the distribution of educated and unemployed persons across the country, which in turn can be used as a basis for skilling of youth to make them more employable by industry.

“While it will be easy to capture the data on number of people who have travelled by rail and flight but those who have taken roads or walked back to their hometown would take a huge amount of guesswork,” said a statistician, requesting anonymity.

As per the World Bank, 50-60,000 people had moved from urban areas to their homes in rural areas last month due to the nationwide lockdown that began March 25.

Seeking more details or adding more households in the survey could be explored as the extant PLFS questionnaire covers new people entering the households.

“However, everything is on hold now. We will have to see if we can start a sample survey when the lockdown ends,” the official added.

PLFS was launched in April 2017. The first Annual Report (July 2017-June 2018) covering both rural and urban areas giving estimates of all important parameters of employment and unemployment was released in May 2019.

The last survey report released in November showed India’s unemployment rate in urban areas for all ages was 9.3% in the January-March quarter of 2019 compared with 9.9% in the trailing three month period.

“We are finalising the new survey reports,” the official added.