There has been practically a no holds barred debate in India regarding jobless growth . The sad part is that like most debates in India, commentators are sometimes blissfully unaware of real time data. So much so that economists in India have defined employment but have been unable to count employment in a proper sense even after 70 years! This piece relates to our recent study on counting employment in India (both formal and informal) through use of real time data analytics.Currently, Labour Bureau has been conducting Quarterly Employment Surveys (QES), whose fifth round was published recently. Though honest in intention, it is marred by several limitations as it elicits response from only 8 sectors (against a universe of 190 sectors), results are released with a 9-month lag, all information is provided on a voluntary basis and not verified and does not capture employment data on new units. For that matter, even other surveys suffer from similar limitations. Given this background, we decided to construct a count of formal and informal sector payroll in India, imitating the US monthly payroll report.First, what is the exact count of labour force that is coming into the market every year? We estimate that on an average 25 million babies are born per year, out of which 15 million are added to labour force (after conservatively assuming 40% of them voluntarily remain out of labour force or are involved in domestic/ agriculture work). Out of 15 million, 6.6 million are graduates.To begin with, we looked at formal sector payroll numbers through EPFO, ESIC, NPS and GPF. We used all these numbers to find the stock of organised sector payroll in India as on March 2017. We also use such data to estimate the incremental payroll in India for current fiscal (till March 2018) and compare it with like period the previous year.In our analysis, we made stringent assumptions to ensure our payroll numbers were mostly conservative. For example, in EPFO, we estimated the numbers of people only in the age-group of 18-25 who joined in that particular year and made a continuous non-zero contribution to their corpus. We deleted all records in EPFO that were incomplete and enrolled under Amnesty Scheme. For ESIC, we ensured that we dropped the payroll numbers that were common to ESIC and EPFO and only considered the new joinees in the age-group of 18-22. Under NPS, we only considered new subscribers of central and state government, as it is compulsory and involves Tier I accounts. In the process, we deleted those enrolled under corporate scheme and even Atal Pension Yojana, as these are potentially double counting. Clearly, our estimates have a downward bias.Based on these, our total stock of payroll is around 9.2 crore (including zero contributions, it is around 10 crore) and is much lower than NSSO estimate. Based on all estimates, we believe that 7 million formal jobs are being added to payroll on a yearly basis.The formal sector payroll number may be enlarged further if we are able to include data from professional bodies (like ICAI, ICSI, National Bar Council, Medical Council of India, etc) and income tax payees in India. We estimate one crore people employed across all such professional bodies. Even school teachers, university teachers and staff are not covered under EPFO and our number of 1.7 crore state employees may be an underestimate.What could be the next steps? First, the informal sector payroll must be counted through robust use of big data. For example, we estimate at least 20 lakh people are employed in the auto sector in India. Second, given the wide disparity in fertility rate across states, we must encourage labour intensive industries in states having high fertility rates. Third, EPFO, ESIC and NPS in collaboration should publish monthly report of new payroll in India – those who have made a first contribution to their schemes monthly with age buckets, geography, top 20 industry classification in every month.Fourth, it should be mandatory for professional bodies, hospitals, nursing homes, etc to submit details of new joinees every three months to the local government offices. Fifth, government should ask every GST filer to give total number of permanent employees and contract employees on payroll. Finally, let us also incentivise.Let us make a new beginning on payroll reporting in India!(Soumya Ghosh is Chief Economic Adviser, State Bank of India. Pulak Ghosh is Professor, IIM Bangalore. Views are personal)