New Delhi: India’s urban unemployment rate between January and March this year fell to 9.3 per cent, the lowest in four quarters. The numbers, recorded in the Statistics Ministry’s quarterly jobs report, could provide relief to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has drawn flak for not being able to create enough jobs amid economic slowdown. The urban unemployment rate of the January-March quarter is compared with 9.9 per cent in the preceding quarter. Quarterly data prior to April-June 2018 survey period is not available and the January-March quarter’s rate is the lowest since then.
The report, which is likely to be published soon, did not assess rural unemployment.
The estimates were arrived at using “current weekly status” which gives an average picture of unemployment in seven days preceding the survey period, the document said. A person is considered jobless if he did not work even for one hour during a week.
Joblessness among the youth – between 15 and 29 years and who account for a third of India’s 1.3 billion people, was marginally lower at 22.5 per cent in the quarter ending March 2019, from 23.7 per cent in the preceding quarter.
The government has in recent years faced public ire for not releasing comprehensive jobs data regularly.
The first extensive annual report for the July 2017-June 2018 period, leaked in February and published in a business newspaper, showed unemployment rate was the highest in at least 45 years. Modi’s government officially released the report in May.
That month, the Statistics Department also released quarterly urban unemployment reports that revealed data for April to December 2018. The fall in the unemployment rate came as jobs among regular wage employees and a section of self-employed workers increased during the period, the ministry report showed.
Still, the labour force participation rate – the percentage of population making up the labour force – which had slowly edged up between April and December last year, recorded a dip to 36 per cent during the March quarter, the report showed, reflecting weak economic growth in Asia’s third largest economy.
India’s economic growth fell to a four-year low of 5.8 per cent in the January-March period. Subsequently, it fell to 5 per cent in the following quarter.