Stats ministry to release unemployment data from April: Secretary Saurabh Garg

The government till now has been releasing quarterly statistics on unemployment for urban areas and annual statistics for rural areas.

The monthly numbers for unemployment rate for urban areas will be available from l April onwards, Saurabh Garg, ministry of statistics and programme implementation noted at the Celebration of 75 years of National Sample Survey Office.

Garg noted that while the ministry was collecting data since January, the data will be released after studying the results of the January-March quarter.

The government till now has been releasing quarterly statistics on unemployment for urban areas and annual statistics for rural areas.

The ministry has also been working to release the results of the Time Use Survey, which gauges the amount of time spent on household work and is instrumental in determining the time spent by women in unpaid household work.

"Time use survey covers 0.13 million households and the results will be available within the next few weeks," Garg noted.

Garg also emphasised on the work being done by the ministry on making district level estimates available.

"Sample designs have been modified to make district level estimates available. State policies can benefit much more from survey data that is being used," Garg highlighted.

The secretary also pointed out that the government has also completed pilot survey of service sector enterprises and shall start with annual surveys from next year.

The government already conducts surveys on Unincorporated Sector Enterprises and Annual Survey of Industries.

Besides, the ministry had also started conducting a forward looking survey in 2024 to gauge capex intention of private enterprises for the coming year.

The event marking 75 years of NSS was also attended by G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant, who lauded the efforts undertaken by organisation and stressed on the need to incorporate new technologies like artificial intelligence for data collection.

"NSS must embrace technology to enhance data collection.

Automating process can help data collection. We also need to leverage alternative data sources like satellite imagery and mobile data," Kant noted.