MC Exclusive: Govt considers releasing monthly unemployment data; GDP, CPI base year revision call by year-end, say sources

India’s employment data has been a point of contention for the government and economists. Private agencies like CMIE have become a ready- reference point for unemployment data.

India is planning on releasing unemployment data with more frequency and contemplating a decision on revision of base year of inflation and gross domestic product (GDP) by year end, sources informed Moneycontrol.

The ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI) is considering increasing the frequency of quarterly urban unemployment surveys to monthly, while it is also contemplating quarterly release of rural employment data, they said.

“We are exploring these alternatives to find out if we can increase frequency,” a person aware of the development said.

The ministry has also been considering revising the consumer inflation base to 2024, while it is undecided yet on GDP revision.

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MoSPI released the full report of 2022-23 round of household consumption expenditure survey earlier this month. It is also conducting two back-to-back surveys on household consumption expenditure with the second likely to be concluded next month.

The ministry had decided to conduct two surveys was to ensure robustness of data, as it had last conducted the survey in 2011. The 2017-18 survey was junked citing data inconsistencies.

It is also parallelly conducting a market survey to identify markets and items to collect price data, which will help determine basket of good for consumer inflation and be used to collect monthly price data.

Employment data

India’s employment data has been a point of contention for the government and economists. Private agencies like CMIE have become a ready- reference point for unemployment data.

Currently, the urban unemployment data is calculated using a periodic labour force survey, which is conducted every quarter.

Besides urban unemployment, the periodic labour force survey captures labour force participation and worker participation rates.

The methodology used by the survey relies on current weekly status, where the estimates are calculated based on the last seven days.

Urban unemployment, for instance, is calculated if a person could not find even an hour of work in the seven days preceding the survey period. It declined to 6.7 percent in the last quarter of FY24 compared with 6.8 percent during a similar period last year.

Female labour force participation rate rose to its highest level of 25.6 percent in Q4FY24 from 25 percent in the previous quarter.

The rural survey, which is likely to be presented quarterly, will follow a similar methodology, according to sources.

“The goal would be to move such indicators to monthly releases,” person added.

At present, the rural data is released annually following usual status methodology, which takes 365 days as period of consideration instead of seven days.