The Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey was carried out in 2015-2016. It has been close to a year and a half since then and we haven’t had any fresh unemployment data being published by the government.

As Volume 2 of the Economic Survey of 2016-2017 released earlier this month, points out: “The lack of reliable estimates on employment in recent years has impeded its measurement and thereby the Government faces challenges in adopting appropriate policy interventions.” It then lists out 10 ways used by the government to measure unemployment and the problems with them. The problems listed are: “Partial coverage, inadequate sample size, low frequency, long time lags, double counting, conceptual differences and definitional issues, rarely used for the purpose of employment estimation etc.” This, of course, leads to the question why have 10 wrong ways of measuring unemployment and not one right way?