A comprehensive employment policy combined with an industrial policy is necessary to address the crisis.
A report in this paper (IE, November 1) on various employment estimates for 2017-18, based on the PLFS (periodic labour force survey) data, has received considerable attention. We have received several queries from policy makers regarding the differences in our employment estimates with studies by Laveesh Bhandari and Amaresh Dubey (BD), and Himanshu that are quoted in the report. In this article, we clarify the reasons for the differences and highlight the major findings of our study.
First, our estimates are different from that of BD because theirs are based only on the usual principal status (UPS) of employment. Our study is based on both usual principal and subsidiary status (UPSS) of employment. Since Himanshu’s estimates are also based on UPSS, our figures are not much different except for the 2017-18 PLFS figures. Himanshu’s and our estimates for employment in both 2004-05 and 2011-12 are almost the same (the negligible difference is because of the use of population multipliers that differ at second and third decimal points). The discrepancy with Himanshu’s 2017-18 employment figure is only because he probably used a lower population multiplier based on a projected total population of 1.33 billion.
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