India’s unemployment rate fell marginally between July 2018-June 2019 to 5.8% compared to 6.1% during the same period in 2017-18 while the
labour force participation rate in the country rose marginally to 37.5% as against 36.9% in the corresponding period of 2017-18. Even the worker population ratio went up to 35.3% as against 34.7% in 2017-18 annual survey, says
the ministry of statistics and programme implementation in its annual periodic labour force survey released on Thursday.
The unemployment rate in
urban India fell from 7.8% earlier to 7.7% in 2018-19 while the
rural unemployment fell to 5% compared to 5.3% in July-June 2017-18. Even the
female participation rate has improved in both urban and rural India during the period under consideration with the overall female participation rate going up to 18.6% in 2018-19 compared to 17.5% in 2017-18
PLFS is India’s first computer-based survey, which gives estimates of key employment and unemployment indicators like the labour force participation rates, worker population ratio, proportion unemployed and unemployment rate in rural households annually and on quarterly basis for the urban households.
Besides, the PLFS also gives the distribution of educated and unemployed persons across the country, which in turn can be used as a basis for skilling of youth to make them more employable by industry.
Launched in 2017, Mospi released the first annual report (July 2017-June 2018), covering both rural and urban areas, in May 2019.
However, the last survey report released in November showed India’s unemployment rate in urban areas for all ages at 9.3% in the January-March quarter of 2019 compared with 9.9% in the trailing three month period.
Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is the percentage of persons in the labour force (i.e. working or seeking or available for work) in the population while the worker population ratio (WPR) is the percentage of employed persons in the population and the unemployment rate (UR) is the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force.
For the 2018-19 survey, 1,01,579 households (55,812 in rural areas and 45,767 in urban areas) were surveyed while the number of persons surveyed was 4,20,757 (2,39,817 in rural areas and 1,80,940 in urban areas).