The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has certified that unemployment in Meghalaya stands at 2.98 per cent, which is below the national average of 6.78 per cent. This was stated by Deputy Chief Minister Prestone Tynsong in the Meghalaya Assembly. The question is whether this data is reliable and whether Meghalaya really has such low unemployment figures. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) definition says only those doing decent jobs should be marked as employed. Decent work sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives and involves, among other things, opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, and better prospects for personal development and social integration.
The CMIE does not differentiate between those in decent jobs and those who are not. If the ILO criteria of decent jobs are applied, the unemployment rate will be much higher, economists critical of the CMIE survey say. CMIE uses the Consumer Pyramids Household Surveys (CPHS) which are high-frequency large-scale surveys that are widely used, particularly to assess the short-term changes in the economic conditions of households. The reason why states and other institutions have had to rely on the CMIE data is because the Ministry of Statistics and programme Implementation tends to withhold data. Even the National Statistical Survey Office (NSSO) does not give out data on the economic conditions of households, hence the CMIE data is the only one available. But there are problems in the Survey. The CPHS surveys households living in about 174,000 sample houses (about 111,000 rural and 63,400 urban) spread across most states in India. An alternative survey from the “People of India” module finds serious problems in the sample design and survey implementation of the CPHS. Although referred to as household surveys in the documentation, the CPHS are surveys of people living in sampled houses. The sample is designed to create a panel, with the same houses selected for repeated surveys. The entire CPHS documentation incorrectly uses the word household to refer to houses. This is the cause of much confusion. In CPHS waves since 2016, even if all persons living in a house change, the sampled house is treated as the same household, though it is marked that all the members have changed.
The definition of a household used in the CPHS is very different from the way households are defined in official surveys like those conducted by the NSSO where household refers to a group of people who normally live together and eat their meals together (commonly formulated as “eating from a common kitchen”). While this definition uses eating from a common kitchen as a key condition, the existence of a physical structure that is used solely as a kitchen is not a requirement. The CPHS documentation does not provide a clear method for identifying houses. In CPHS a household is defined by the existence of a physical structure in which a group of people live and there exist physical structures and facilities (such as a kitchen, a verandah or an electricity connection) that are shared by this group of people. Households that did not have such shared physical structures like a kitchen, for example “nomadic households”, were not included in CPHS. It would be educative for Meghalaya to get the State’s unemployment data from local universities such as NEHU to clear all doubts.
