India's job data

The Indian economy is chugging along at a fairly healthy rate. We’re told that new jobs are being created every month. And the claims by the govt are fairly large. EPFO data claims that nearly 40 lakh jobs have been created since September last year. Critics have panned these numbers as, at best, low wage jobs like selling pakodas or, at worst, make believe and badly written fiction.

On SOTD today, we’re going to try to make sense of the govt’s data and perhaps get at the actual story that these numbers present.

The whole job creation back-and-forth was kicked off by a report by two men, Pulak Ghosh, a professor at Indian Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economic adviser at State Bank of India, who declared that their research indicated India will add 7 million jobs in 2017-18. The numbers cited in the research paper were based, for the most part, on new registrations in the EPFO, the retirement fund body under the labour ministry.