Modi govt plays with data before election to show unemployment declining
By Dr. Gyan Pathak
In a written reply on December 11, 2023 in the Lok Sabha during the current winter session, the Minister of State for Labour and Employment Rameshwar Teli claimed that unemployment rate in the country is on a declining trend over the years, obviously to give a political message to the electorate in general, and the unemployed youth in particular that the government under PM Narendra Modi’s leadership is performing well on the unemployment front. However, only two days later it was discovered that 4 out of the 6 that breached the parliament security on December 13, were actually distressed on account of unemployment. One of the arrested woman claimed that she wanted to draw the attention of the Modi government to this.
We don’t yet know, if she was able to draw the attention of the Centre on this worsening problem on the ground at a time when the Lok Sabha election 2024 is approaching and the RSS-BJP clan and the ministers and officials under PM Modi have been busy in image makeover of the government on the employment front. For quite some time PM Modi has been distributing appointment letters to unemployed youth and now it is being claimed that unemployment rates has been brought down over the years, which is not substantiated with adequate evidence even while the government data shows much more reduced rate than the much elevated levels of unemployment in the private data such as that of the Centre of Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
The government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey produces several sets of data, and one of them always show unemployment rates to be very low. This data is based on ‘usual status’ which the government loves to quote since it is useful as a face saving device for the government. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and many national and International organizations have even raised their fingers on the quality of the government’s data, which is an additional concern for the people of the country.
Let us look at the data that Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Teli quoted in parliament. It said that the unemployment rate in 2018-19 was 5.8 per cent, 4.8 per cent in 2019-20, 4.2 per cent in 2020-21, 4.1 per cent in 2021-22, and 3.2 per cent in 2022-23. Politically speaking, it improves the image of the Modi government. However, one should recall how the government had suppressed the data for 2017-18 just before Lok Sabha election 2019, exactly 5 years ago, when the unemployment rate reached 6.1 per cent which was at a 45 year high. There were resignations of top officials in protest and the data was leaked. The Modi government then only said that the report was under scrutiny. Finally government had accepted the data once the election results were out in May 2019, and made structural changes and merged the department to avoid any further humiliation. The data now being provided under the new system is therefore seen as suspect.
Nevertheless, if one wants to see another set of government data on the ‘current weekly status basis’ the situation may seem horribly worse for the Modi government. The annual report on the PLFS 2022-23 released in October 2023 reveals unemployment rate in 2017-18 and 2018-19 at 8.7 per cent, 8.8 per cent in 2019-20, 7.5 per cent in 2020-21, 6.6 per cent in 2021-22, and 5.1 per cent in 2022-23.
Such annual reports also put the unemployment rate lower than the quarterly data of PLFS. The quarterly data are collected from urban areas, while data on rural unemployment are available only in the annual data. This gives government a chance to show a more comfortable picture on total unemployment rate. The allegation of discrepancies apart, such as in ESI and PF quarterly and annual data.
Let us examine the Quarterly bulletins of 2022-23. The latest data released on November 29, 2023 shows that unemployment rate (CWS) in July-September 2022 was 7.4 per cent, October-December 2022 was 7.2 per cent, January-March 2023 was 6.8 per cent, April-June 2023 was 6.6 per cent and July-September 2023 was 6.6 per cent. Obviously, unemployment rate is too elevated to cope with, while the minister’s claim in parliament does not tally with the real data.
The private data we have gives different pictures of unemployment in the country which is far worse than the government data. No wonder the Union Minister of Labour and Employment has warned several times in the past that people should not believe the private data.
For example, all India unemployment rate in November 2023 as per the CMIE data was as high as 9.16 per cent. It was only little less than 10.05 per cent in October which was at a 29-month high. The rural unemployment rate eased to 9.05 per cent in November from 10.82 per cent the previous month, while the urban unemployment rate rose to 9.39 per cent from 8.44 per cent.
Further, CMIE data showed that the labour participation rate (LPR) in November decreased to 41.11 per cent from 41.65 per cent in October. In urban areas, the LPR declined to 38.85 per cent in November from 39.36 per cent in October, and in rural India, it fell to 42.27 per cent from 42.83 per cent.
The ground reality is much worse than even CMIE data, since the counting system of the employed and unemployed is questionable. It should also be noted that a person getting one hour of paid work in a week is counted as employed, in a country where minimum wage is too low to enable workers to have healthy food. Additionally, a person, who has even left in search of jobs out of frustration because there is no job in the market, is not counted as unemployed. There are also many other lacunae in the data, including disguised unemployment in the agriculture sector and among self-employed youth. (IPA Service)