Centre sets up panel to bring transparency in jobs data

The government on Monday set up a panel under former chief statistician T C A Anant to bring in transparency in employment data.

The panel will look into the relevance of the labour bureau’s quarterly survey and recommend to the government on whether the survey can be replaced by more transparent payroll data.

“The quarterly employment survey (QES) is an enterprise based survey, carried out with an objective to measure the relative change in employment situation over successive quarters for the establishments having 10 or more workers.

“The QES has several limitations. Enterprise data of the 6th Economic Census (January 2013 - April 2014), therefore, does not include the new units which have been added after April 2014 and, takes into account the enterprise having more than 10 workers and does not cover employment in establishments having less than 10 workers.

“As a result, the QES effectively captures the employment size of about 2.40 crore workers only as against the total workforce of about 47 crore,” an official statement said.

It said the labour bureau conducts two major surveys on employment scenario — Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey (EUS) and Quarterly Employment Survey.

So far, five Annual Employment-Unemployment Surveys have been conducted by the labour bureau and reports on all five surveys have been released. The field work of Sixth Annual Employment Unemployment Survey (2016-17) has been completed and data entry validation work is in progress. The report pertaining to 6th Annual EUS is to be completed by September 2018.

Attacking the Centre on jobs data, former finance minister P Chidambaram on Monday asked why the quarterly survey of October-December 2017 by the labour bureau has not yet been released.