The study that claimed 7 million people would be added to the payroll in 2017-18 was triggered by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which had asked the NITI Aayog last October to give “quick indicators for direct or indirect reflections on employment data” to be able to arrive at “desired trends in employment at the earliest.” The NITI Aayog, in turn, helped the authors of the study — Towards a Payroll Reporting in India to gain access to data of around 80 million Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) subscribers.

Since this database is not in ...