New Delhi: The report that states the country’s unemployment rate raised to a 45-year-high in 2017-2018 are “not verified” and the “veracity of the data is not known”, NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar said on Thursday.
“Government did not release the data (on jobs) as it is still being processed. When the data is ready we will release it. Data collection method is different now; we are using a computer assisted personal interviewee in the new survey. It is not right to compare the two data sets, this data is not verified. It is not correct to use this report as final,” Mr Kumar added.
Explaining Kumar’s point that the two reports can’t be compared, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said earlier the data collection and analysis was done in five years.
“We are doing it quarter by quarter. We are capturing incremental change. You need to have four quarters to see if there is an increase or decrease. You’ll need data from fifth quarter to be able to compare the data,” Mr Kant said.
The NITI Aayog CEO went on to say that the problem was not lack of jobs but the lack of good quality jobs. “There is a wages problem and there is large informal sector,” Kant said. He added that there were jobs being created for new entrants, but the quality of those jobs was not high. Kant also said that attempts to formalise the informal jobs sector were underway. “It is unbelievable that no new jobs are being created,” Kant at one point said.
This clarification comes after the government faced opposition attacks over the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO)’s periodic labour force survey, which was withheld by the government but was accessed by the Business Standard newspaper.
The NITI Aayog press conference was announced hours after an explosive Business Standard report that had accessed the delayed NSSO Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), revealed that unemployment in India was at 45-year high and stood at a record 6.1 per cent in the year 2017-18.
