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New Delhi: According to people familiar with the matter, the Indian government plans to bridge the gap in employment figures by next year, with officials gathering job status details of nearly half a billion workers to improve policymaking.
For the formal sector, which comprises more than 75% of the workforce, the government will draw data from surveys of migrant laborers and domestic workers as well as information submitted through a new online portal, the people said, citing rules for identification. told not to. To talk to the media.
The push to collect data could help Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration formulate better policies to generate jobs and provide skill training, as the informal sector accounts for nearly half of India’s GDP. This has become even more important after the mass exodus of migrant workers due to the Covid-19 lockdown earlier this year, leading to labor shortages in cities and affecting the effectiveness of government programmes.
Economists have described India’s jobs data as outdated and inadequate, a problem the government has failed to address. Markets and academics prefer to rely on survey-based unemployment data from the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Labor and Employment could not immediately be contacted for comment.
About a quarter of the workforce is employed in the formal sector, for which data is readily available through retirement plans and state-sponsored insurance. The government has also started polling companies to get more information about workers.
There is a big headache with jotting down personal details of informal workers, including gender and age. To address this, the government launched an online portal known as e-Shram in August that entitles workers to insurance and other social security benefits in exchange for signing up with their personal details. So far, over 100 million workers have signed up and 280 million are yet to go.
People said the government is planning to make social security benefits transferable from this website when a worker moves to the formal sector or to a new location. He said most workers would sign up for it by next year and by then the details of the first surveys capturing the distribution of domestic workers and the socio-economic conditions of migrant workers would also be available. ,bloomberg
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