-The Hindu India has no industrial policy or employment strategy to ride the wave of its demographic dividend Job creation has slowed since 2011-12, the year of the last published National Sample Survey Office (nssO) labour force survey. I used Labour Bureau annual survey (2015-16) data and Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Ltd. (CMIE) data (post-2016), which has a sample size larger than the nssO labour force surveys, to reach this...

-The Hindu There needs to be robust infrastructure for official statistics so that governments do not suppress inconvenient truths Over the past two weeks, headlines have focussed on declining employment between 2011-12 and 2016-17; loss of jobs under the National Democratic Alliance government, particularly post-demonetisation; and the government’s refusal to release a report using the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) documenting this decline, leading to resignations of two members of the National...

-TheWire.in Manufacturing jobs actually fell in absolute terms from 58.9 million in 2011-12 to 48.3 million in 2015-16. Economists have been writing for some months that, contrary to the claims of the government, there is plenty of data available that shows unmistakably that unemployment is high and rising. Educated unemployment has worsened just as young people are getting better educated, and expect to work outside agriculture in industry and services. We have done this...

-The Indian Express The state has failed to create capacities for a timely, reliable, decentralised data regime. The credibility of India’s data systems is under serious threat with the recent controversy over the employment data of the National Sample Survey. While the Census of India and the National Sample Survey Organisation (nssO) have a good reputation, when it comes to data related to the social sector — health, education, nutrition —...

-Working Paper No. 74, Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies, Bhubaneswar In this paper, we revisit the well-known debate on the inverse relationship between farm-size and agricultural productivity. Using unit level data from Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of Agricultural Households in the 70th Round National Sample Survey (nss), we test the relationship between yield (output per hectare) and land operated as well as the relationship between net returns per hectare and...