India to start monthly release of unemployment figures in April

The Indian government will begin publishing monthly unemployment figures from April, a senior official said on Friday, in a move aiming to provide more frequent data to policymakers.

Until now, the government released only quarterly unemployment figures for urban areas and combined annual data for urban and rural areas. A Mumbai-based private think tank, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, releases monthly estimates for the country.

"We already are collecting unemployment data from January, but we will be releasing them from April," Saurabh Garg, secretary of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, which oversees the data collection, said at an event.


Garg said the sample designs have been modified since January to gather district-level estimates, adding that detailed employment data would help influence policy even at the local level.

Geeta Singh Rathore, director general of the National Sample Survey (NSS), said that the government would issue monthly estimates on countrywide unemployment, workforce, and employment.

Additionally, the quarterly periodic labour force survey will now provide separate estimates for urban and rural areas, she said.

Rathore also said the sample size for the jobs survey has been increased to around 22,000 from 16,000, a measure aimed at reducing the margin of error.