According to a report in Economic Times, India’s formal sector employment jumped by 0.2 million in the July-September quarter of 2021 compared to the April-June quarter across 11,503 establishments surveyed, the labour ministry said on Monday.
As per the quarterly employment survey for the second quarter of the current fiscal, 31.0 million jobs were created in the country in the given quarter compared to 30.8 million in the April-June quarter of 2021. However, comparative data for the preceding fiscal is not available as the QES was suspended for several years and was launched in its present revamped form from April-June 2021.
Employment Estimated
The present survey covers establishments with 10 or more employees across nine sectors including manufacturing, construction, trade, transport, education, health, accommodation and restaurants, IT/BPO and financial services.
The last comparable date which is used by the ministry as a base includes the Economic Census 2013-14 which had pegged India’s workforce across these sectors at 23.7 million.
As per the QES, of the total employment estimated in the selected nine sectors, nearly 39% was in manufacturing followed by 22% in education and 10% in both health as well as IT/BPOs sectors. Employment in trade and transport sectors accounted for 5.3% and 4.6% respectively.
Further, the overall percentage of female workers in the second quarter was higher at 32.1%, compared to 29.3% reported during the first round of QES.
Employment Generation
“Regular workers constitute 87% of the estimated workforce in the nine selected sectors, with only 2% being casual workers,” the labour ministry said in the report, adding 20% of the workers in the construction sector were contractual and 6.4% were casual workers.
The report further said that an estimated 5.6% of the establishments were having vacancies in positions and the estimated number of total vacancies was 4.3 lakhs, of which 65.8% were not due to retirement or resignation of the employees.
The Labour Bureau, under the ministry of labour and employment, had last done the seventh QES for the July-September quarter of 2017. Work of the eighth QES for October-December 2017 was subsequently put on hold because of a wide divergence in data on employment generation under this survey and the payroll data.
According to the ministry, the quarter-on-quarter survey results will provide a relative change in employment situation over successive quarters in the above segment of the Indian economy. (Economic Times)
