The recent KLEMS [capital (K), labour (L), energy (E), material (M) and services (S)]data by the Reserve Bank of India and the ASUSE (Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises) employment numbers of the government broadly match, SBI Research said in its Ecowrap report released on Wednesday.
SBI’s report comes days after a Citigroup report said India will struggle to create sufficient employment opportunities even with a 7% growth rate.
According to the SBI report, while the central bank’s KLEMS (capital, labour, energy, materials, services) data pegs total labour force of India at 597 million, the ASUSE survey conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) pegs it at 568 million. The difference is miniscule.
Besides, the share of the formal labour force is 55% as per ASUSE survey and 61% as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO).
The SBI report took the share of the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation with KLEMS for FY24 and found it to be at 28%, which it said is drastically lower than the average share of the five-year period (FY19-FY23) at 51%. “As EPFO data capture primarily low-income jobs, the declining share is quite encouraging and indicates that possibly better paid jobs are getting available in the economy,” the report said. As per the report, the government surveys data differ from private employment reports mainly because private surveys possibly suffer from innate flaws in their sample selection technique, thereby under-representing women and young children as also the poor, while over-representing the other extreme.
