Need for more frequent labour data by govt flagged, with focus on rural

Subject: Economy

Details:

The Centre is learnt to have held discussions at the highest level to look into the delay in frequency of the release of government employment-unemployment data, with one of the main concerns pertaining to the time lag in the release of the official Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) as against privately-conducted surveys such as the one brought out by Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

Periodic Labour Force Survey

The National Statistical Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics of Programme and Implementation (MoSPI) conducts the PLFS for rural and urban areas.
The survey was launched in 2017 and the first annual report was released (July 2017-June 2018), covering both rural and urban areas, in May 2019
Labour data for rural areas is published annually, while that for urban areas is released every quarter. There is a gap of at least a year in the release of the annual PLFS report.
PLFS was initially conducted using the Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) application developed by the World Bank with high expectations to improve the time lag to a great extent.

Definitions:

Labour Force Participation Rate: It is the percentage of people in the labour force (those who are working or seeking or available for work) in the population.
Worker Population Ratio is the percentage of employed people.
Unemployment rate shows the percentage of people unemployed among the labour force.
Unemployed: A person who is unable to get work for even an hour in the last seven days despite seeking employment is considered unemployed.