Labour ministry to restructure job survey, include service sector data
Labour bureau to visit over 10,000 firms every quarter, more than four times present number, to track employment
The Union labour ministry will revamp its quarterly job survey to reflect the latest employment data from both the manufacturing and service sectors in a bid to make it more structured and sync it with policymaking.
So far, employment data collection in India has been ad hoc, patchy and irregular. For instance, employment data from many manufacturing and export-oriented firms is available only up to June 2015, unlike export data, which comes in every month.
“The quarterly survey will be revamped soon. We are looking to expand the base of the survey as well. The aim is to have regular up-to-date jobs data for both policymaking and public consumption,” said Daljeet Singh, deputy director general of the labour bureau, which functions under the labour ministry.
“The quarterly survey which has been carried out since 2008-09 (but only for a small segment of companies) will be expanded,” Singh said, adding that the expansion will be in terms of firms visited and sectors covered. The labour bureau will visit some 10,000-plus firms every quarter—more than four times the present number—to track the employment scenario, he said.
To the list of labour-intensive and export-oriented manufacturing companies, the ministry is set to add more job-creating sectors, including banking, insurance, e-commerce and small and medium enterprises, to “get a complete picture”.
The quarterly employment survey was started in OctoberDecember 2008 to assess the impact of the global recession on the Indian job market in eight sectors: textiles, metals, automobiles, leather, gems and jewellery, information technology and business process outsourcing, transport, and handloom and power loom.
“Jobs data internationally create a lot of buzz but in India we have not done that yet on a regular basis. We have been discussing the idea for several months and the broad consensus is that there needs to be a structured employment survey quarter after quarter, with the results announced in time—not a year after,” said a labour ministry official, who declined to be named.
Kamal Karanth, managing director at human resources firm Kelly Services India, said that India does not have a culture of collating structured employment data regularly, but it has huge demand. “Different companies release some jobs surveys but that’s not official reliable data. The labour ministry runs the Employees Provident Fund Organisation and it can be used to track job creation as addition and substraction of active subscribers can be traced through it,” said Karanth.
He said that while there will be initial hiccups and criticism to such an exercise, the ministry should go ahead. “They can track the service sector as it forms a large portion (53%) of the Indian economy now,” he suggested.
Karanth, however, said tracking jobs at the bottom of the pyramid and in sectors like construction will be a challenge.
The labour bureau’s Singh said that though the ministry of statistics was talking about conducting a similar survey, there is no final decision as yet. “They will conduct a pilot late this year but the final outcome is not known. We have the capacity and capability of conducting such a survey and are looking to have a dedicated set of people to conduct the task.”
Despite talk about jobs, employment generation fell by a net 43,000 in the three months ended 30 June from the previous quarter in manufacturing and export-oriented units, according to the labour ministry’s 26th quarterly employment survey.
The net fall in jobs created was the lowest since April-June 2009 (131,000), the height of the global economic crisis, Mint reported on 10 December.
Source: Mint, 10-02-2016
