Dear all,
I am attaching the edit on tracking employment through surveys, which has come out in this week’s EPW.
The edit is brief but the question is what kind of data do we need to understand the employment situation. NSSO is clearly overburdened and cannot be expected to do more. So, it is not just a question of doing more surveys at regular intervals but getting data which is not fully captured by NSS etc. now. The new surveys should bring out information on the following at least:
Sectoral composition of employment, the time spent on different occupations and wages/earnings received;
Working conditions and quality of employment in the so-called unorganised sector, which employs 90 per cent of our workforce;
Clearer measure of the degree and extent of the unemployment problem; and
Inequalities in access to employment – gender, caste, community, region and age.
Viju
