By K Raveendran
A graph tweeted by Rahul Gandhi, sourced to ‘India’s Consumer Economy 360 Survey’, and showing that between 2016 and 2021 income of the poor class decreased by about 50 per cent has put the focus on the think-tank that produced the survey report. Rahul cited the graph to back his claim that ‘no matter how much the public is suffering from inflation and unemployment, the ‘suit-boot government’ has only one target — to fill the coffers of ‘friends. According to the graph, while the poor people saw their income reduce by half, the income of the rich class increased by 40 percent.
But a tweet by Jairam Ramesh in support did not quite agree on the specifics although the import of the message was the same as that of Rahul. “Growth rate of real wages between 2014-15 to 2021-22 per year: 0.9%- Agricultural labour, 0.2%- Construction workers, 0.3%- Non-agricultural labour. But in just the last 5 years Adani’s wealth increased by 1440 per cent. Mitr ka Saath, Mitr ka Vikas!”
India’s Consumer Economy 360 Survey, fancifully abbreviated to ICE360, is produced by PRICE, which claims to be an independent, not-for-profit research centre and think-tank, engaged in building and disseminating seminal knowledge and insights about India’s macro consumer economy and citizen’s environment, for use in formulating public policy and in shaping business strategy. PRICE says it is committed to generating longitudinal data that will allow for realistic projections of India’s household incomes, consumption expenditures and savings for the coming decade.
But there seems to be a lot of scope for greater transparency into what the agency does as access to its surveys is restricted and has to be ordered. Apparently, the agency does custom research for corporates, institutions and others on the basis of commissioning. While the methodology followed by the survey claims the target population is the total population of the country, greater details of the sampling shows a total sample of 722 villages in 105 selected districts, approximately in proportion to rural population of each selected district. In each of the selected villages, approximately 100 households are selected for data collection. This would mean that the total sampling size is way too short of the 100,000-mark.
In contrast, most official surveys are based on the statistics from decennial population census and nationwide quinquennial surveys on employment and unemployment by the erstwhile NSSO under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. NSSO data on employment and unemployment is available up to the year 2011–12 only as the nationwide Employment and Unemployment (E&U) surveys have been replaced by the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Statistical Office, which started in 2017– 18. The PLFS data is available for both rural and urban and the total population on an annual basis. The quarterly data, on the other hand, is available only for urban households.
According to NSO, the PLFS data measure the dynamics in labour force participation, workers to population ratio and the employment status along with related, important parameters for both rural and urban areas, in the usual status and current weekly status (CWS) annually. Annual data sets from the PLFS are now available for four consecutive years—2017–18 to 2020-21. The quarterly data is available up to April–June 2022, but it pertains only to urban households.
In response to the large number of studies and media reports about the deterioration in the employment scene in the country in recent years, the NITI Aayog recently commissioned a working paper to examine the veracity of assertions such as decline in worker-to-population ratio, increase in unemployment, withdrawal of women from workforce and deterioration in the overall employment scenario in the country, among others.
The paper throws up several interesting aspects of employment, some of which agree with the general perceptions while some others paint a divergent scenario. For instance, the paper found the labour-force-participation rate for female remaining less than half of male population though it shows narrowing down over time due to faster increase in the number of female labour. The number of female labour is showing much faster increase in rural areas compared to urban areas. This has turned rural labour force participation rate 50% higher than the rate for urban. The latest data shows that 57.5 per cent of men, 25.1 per cent of women and 41.6 per cent of all persons in India are in the labour force. The increase in the rate reflects the demographic dividend being experienced by India, according to the paper.
The period labour force survey data show rising feminisation of rural and total workforce in the country. Despite this, female comprise 30 percent of total workforce in the country and 23 percent in urban areas. This shows that male dominance in workforce is continuing, although it is weakening.
The extent and incidence of unemployment based on current weekly status of employment is more severe and shows an increase 11 in the number of unemployed persons in two years by 3.4 million. The unemployment rate based on current weekly status remained around 8.8 percent during 2017-18 to 2019-20 and declined in year 2020-21 to 7.4 per cent. CWS unemployment was much lower in rural areas than in urban areas. Also, it showed a decline in rural households and a rise in urban households. (IPA Service)
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