Last month the National Statistical Organisation (NSO) released its periodic labour force survey for the year starting July 2019 and ending June 2020. This report covers the 70 days of lockdown, and hence it gives some idea of how much unemployment was created.

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The report says unemployment has declined in that year, likewise labour participation has also gone up during the lockdown period.

If you look at the labour participation rate, it shows that labour participation has gone up during the entire period of 2019-20.

Therefore, the signal seem to be a little confusing and to understand the periodic labour force better, CNBC-TV18’s Latha Venkatesh spoke to Professor Himanshu of JNU; Roshan Kishore, Editor at Hindustan Times; Santosh Mehrotra, Centre for Eco Dvpt of University of Bath University; and PC Mohanan, former Chairperson, NSC.

Roshan said, “One is if we really want to access the impact of the lockdown we have to be looking at the last quarter in the report, not the entire year because the lockdown was only in the April to June quarter. What stands out for me is your data is something which is meant to capture the world as we see.”

“What did we see during the lockdown we saw during the lockdown hundreds of 1000s of migrant workers going back from cities to villages in tremendous hardship. One thing which the data shows is that urban employment fell sharply and rural employment actually - more than a crore jobs were lost in urban India in that last quarter when the lockdown was there and rural jobs increased by an even greater amount.”

“What the lockdown really did was it forced people from more productive higher income sectors of the economy to less productive, lower-income sectors of the economy. That I think is the main economic challenge we are still dealing with today.”

Mehrotra said, “I think the most important point that we need to take away from this is that we cannot continue to rely upon the usual status employment. We can use it, there is no problem in order to be able to have comparable data from before, with the times earlier. But since we have got an annual report now, comparable to an international standard, though, I think there are still issues, I won't go into those I think we need to rely much more on the current weekly status, because that is the international standard. This is point one.”

He added, “You see, there are two forces at play here, which seem to explain the rise in the labour force participation as well as the worker participation rates, despite the fact that open unemployment absolute numbers have increased. The rates have been driven primarily by women's work, labour force participation, worker participation increased more than that of men it has increased. But why has it increased that also comes out with a careful look at the report at the data? What it shows is that distress has actually driven women to increase their participation.”

For full interview, watch accompanying video...

(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)

First Published:Aug 2, 2021 8:49 PM IST