NEW DELHI: Unemployment rate in the country is 6.1%, the statistics ministry said on Friday reiterating the leaked figure in the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18.
The National Sample Survey Office was rocked by controversy after one of its statisticians PC Mohanan quit citing the government’s reluctance to release the report compiled by him and his team.
The unemployment rate of 6.1% is the highest in the country for the past four and a half decades. The last time India saw such high unemployment rate was in 1972-73. The assessment period for the data was between July 2017 and June 2018.
The release of the report comes a day after Narendra Modi was sworn in as prime minister for the second time. Unemployment was one of the biggest issues that resonated through the campaign going into the elections in which the BJP swept to power securing a majority on its own.
Throughout the election campaign, the Congress had accused the BJP government of deliberately withholding the report fearing dents in their electoral prospects.
After the leak of the data, Niti Aayog vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar had said that the report was not released as it was in its draft stage, a claim that was refuted by Mohanan.
The government, however, refused to provide comparative data for the joblessness.
“It is a new design, new metric (with which figures were calculated)... It would be unfair to compare it with the past,” chief statistician Pravin Srivastava said.
The report also said that female labour participation rate in urban areas for the December-ending quarter was 19.5% while for males it was 73.6%.
The report showed that 7.8% of all employable youth in urban areas was unemployed while the rural figure was 5.3%.
The unemployment rate among men across the country was 6.2%, while for women, it stood at 5.7%.