Do you want a job that does not pay you at all? The answer will be surely 'no' for most of us. And yet, in our previous analysis, it was found that the proportion of 'helpers in household enterprises' among the total number of workers grew over various rounds of annual PLFS (Periodic Labour Force Survey), from 13.3 percent to 15.9 percent between PLFS 2018-19 and PLFS 2019-20, and then...

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...

-Newsclick.in India's job market is tightening, and skilled workers are finding it harder to enter the workforce. Government job drives and the informal economy have been unable to make up the difference. Pramod Lal is a 23-year-old recent business graduate from northern India, who thought he had the credentials to be competitive in the job market. However, Lal's attempts to start a career have yet to succeed. "Education is no guarantee for a...

-India Spend/ Scroll.in These programmes should look at skilling the workforce for paid jobs rather than unpaid, part-time volunteers. Central government programmes on water emphasise groundwater management by the community in a decentralised manner but, by and large, these schemes are silent on the availability, training and deployment of a skilled workforce for this task, especially in rural areas. Water management at the most decentralised, local levels is often a part-time, volunteer or...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...