NEW DELHI: The number of net new subscribers to the Employees Provident Fund almost trebled to 8.61 lakh in February compared to 2.87 lakh in the same month of last year, data released by the EPFO showed.
The figures released by the EPFO, however, are from the period September 2017 onwards and show a negative net payroll addition only for the month of March 2018. The highest net job additions were in January 2019 at 8.94 lakh against the provisional estimate of 8.96 lakh released last month.
However, economists said the data did not seem to correlate with the industrial scenario.
“The index of industrial production grew by just 0.1 % in February 2019, it grew by just 1.7 % in January … these do not seem to be the kind of figures which support such growth in jobs,” said Prof. Biswajit Dhar of the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Analysts said that much of the new jobs being reported by EPFO could be a mere formalization of existing jobs as the rules say that any unit with 20 or more workers have to compulsorily join in the provident fund scheme. They also point to frequent revisions in the data published by the EPFO.
In the month of February itself, of the net new additions to the payroll after deducting the numbers who had exited and those who had rejoined some 4.67 lakh were in the age group 18-25.
While another 4.08 lakh were in the age group of 25-35 and above, an indication analysts said of existing workers being formalized and enrolled in the EPFO.
Today’s data release showed the EPFO has revised downward the number of net subscribers added or new jobs created from September 2017 to January 2019 to 72.24 lakh from 76.48 lakh released last month.
The sharpest revision was for March 2018 in the latest report which showed contraction or exit of 55,934 members from the EPFO subscriptions. Last month, the EPFO payroll data had shown that as many as 29,023 members exited from its schemes in March 2018.
In February 2019, the EPFO data had shown that as many as 5,498 members joined EPFO schemes in March 2018. The EPFO, however, explained the data changes by pointing out that the data is provisional as updation of employee records is a continuous process and gets updated in subsequent months.
8.61 lakh net new subscribers to the EPFO in February according to the latest data
2.87 lakh were the number of subscribers in February 2018