Labour Minister replies to Parliament

There is no data available on unemployment subsequent to the period of demonetisation, Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar told Parliament on Monday, in a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha.

More than a third of the questions asked by Members of Parliament to the Labour Ministry on Monday were related to unemployment data. The Ministry held firmly to citing Labour Bureau surveys on unemployment, for which the latest data available is pre-demonetisation. According to this data, the unemployment rate in 2015-16 was 3.7%, Mr. Gangwar said.

‘Not centrally’

In response to another question, Mr. Gangwar said, “Information related to impact of demonetisation on employment in the unorganised sector is not maintained centrally.”

With regard to the NSSO’s survey, Mr. Gangwar only said that the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) has “initiated” the PLFS, whose primary objective is “to measure quarterly changes of key Labour Force Indicators such as Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Unemployment Rate (UR) in urban areas as well as to generate the annual estimates of different labour force indicators both in rural and urban areas…The report of the same has not been published,” he said.

Asked why the Labour Bureau’s Quarterly Employment Surveys have been put on hold, he said that a committee under the chairmanship of former MoSPI secretary T.C.A. Anant had submitted a report examining the current relevance of these surveys and that the report was being studied.