While things looked anxious in April amid an increasing unemployment rate, they seemed to have gotten better in May. The unemployment rate in India has cooled off a bit at 7.12% in May, 2022 compared with 7.83% in the preceding month, according to data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). This is a decline of 9.06%.
The urban unemployment dropped 10.95% to 8.21% in May and the rural unemployment fell 7.7% in the same month to 6.62%. Chhattisgarh reported the lowest unemployment rate at 0.7% while Haryana reported the highest joblessness rate at 24.6%.
The unemployment rate fell in May as economic activity continued to pick up pace across India, says Ajoy Thomas, Vice President and Business Head (Retail, Ecommerce, Logistics & transportation), TeamLease Services.
Similar to the experiences in the rest of the world, a few sectors within the services industry have done well consistently, according to Thomas. “Jobs in the Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITES) services have rebounded with improved mobility and strong services export on the back of digitisation initiatives by companies worldwide.”
“Agriculture has been the largest employer followed by the ‘wholesale and retail trading’ and ‘real estate and construction sectors. Within agriculture, reverse migration has seen the biggest increase in employment of farm labourers, which are a part of daily wage labourers,” he said.
CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) data also suggests a significant increase in employment among industrial workers during the recent past.
“These are salaried employees who work as industrial workers, typically in a factory. It does not include daily wage labourers who could be working in factories but includes contract labour. It includes salaried workers on the shop floor and instructors, plant operators, assemblers and assembly line operators, mill workers, mine workers, industrial machine operators and industrial equipment operators,” said a CMIE report.
“These are relatively good quality jobs and it is therefore particularly heartening to see an increase in their count in recent times,” it said.