KOCHI: The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), considered the most exhaustive and systematically conducted employment survey in the country, has good news for Kerala. The survey estimates that the total workforce in the state grew to 1.51 crore in 2023-24 from 1.30 crore in 2020-21, an increase of more than 16% over the three-year period.
What’s even more encouraging is that the major drivers of this growth were women’s employment and regular job opportunities. The survey says that female participation in the workforce in the state grew from 32.3% in 2020-21 to 36.4% in 2023-24.
At the national level, it gained from 29.5% to 34.2%. “While the growth of women in the workforce at the national level is mostly in the category of agriculture-based self-employment, often as unpaid helpers in family farms, in Kerala, the growth is mostly of regular workers in services,” says C A Sethu, a researcher at Bengaluru-based Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS).
The types of work analysed by PLFS can be divided into self-employment, casual work and regular work. “Kerala’s employment growth, led by expansion in regular work, is a welcome development, as it indicates stable and secure opportunities are emerging in the state’s labour market. Especially when read together with a parallel decline in casual labour in absolute numbers,” says Sethu, who studied the survey in detail. While Kerala’s trends are similar to national ones, the degree of change in the state is much higher, he points out.
Dr K Ravi Raman, member, Kerala State Planning Board, says both figures show that there has been an accentuated decline in unemployment in Kerala under the Left regime, from 11.4% to 7.2% over the last eight years. “There is also an increasingly favourable incorporation of women in the labour market.
This must have taken place because of two factors: an increased flow of private investment into MSMEs, as is evident from an increase in the number of such units and significant number of those owned by women entrepreneurs,” he explains. For instance, during the second Pinarayi government, of the three lakh-plus enterprises newly registered, 93,000 (31%) were owned by women entrepreneurs, says Dr Raman.
Women who are also educated understand that their right to participate in the workforce is increasingly being facilitated by the state, which in turn shows the state’s concern in mainstreaming gender in the labour market. “Overall, Kerala’s labour market is robust with an average wage, which is more than double the national average and gender-friendly. In other words, Kerala’s labour market is not only vibrant and formal but also gender-friendly,” he adds.
Conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO), PLFS is a national representative sample survey that provides insights into the country’s labour market through indicators such as estimates of employment status, industry of work, and trends in self-employment, casual labour, and regular employment.
Among individuals with tertiary education (graduate and above), the share of unemployed persons declined notably both at the national and state level, the survey says. At the all-India level, it fell from 14.8% in 2020–21 to 12.9% in 2023–24. Kerala, which has historically experienced higher educated unemployment, saw a more pronounced drop–from 27.9% to 20.4% over the same period.
Rakkee Thimothy, a fellow at Kochi-based Centre for Socio-economic and Environmental Studies (CSES), however, adds a note of caution. “I am not sure about Kerala’s performance with respect to employment growth, as the period of comparison is around Covid time (2020-21) and 2023-24,” she said. According to her, Kerala has always had issues with employment generation.
Dr Shamna Thachaparmban, assistant professor of public finance at the Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, the comparison is made against the pandemic period. “That comparison may not be fully appropriate from an academic perspective as during Covid time the base was low,” she said. But Sethu says the story would be the same if we extend the period to 2017-18.
