Data showcased on January 1st, 2023, by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) suggests that India’s unemployment rate rose to 8.30 percent in December, the highest in 2022.
According to the given data, the urban unemployment rate surged to 10 percent during the last month of the year, while the rural unemployment rate slipped to 7.44 percent in December from 7.55 percent in November 2022.
CMIE has calculated the country’s unemployment rate based on a panel size of over 1.78 lakh households. Among the states, Haryana continues to be the state with the highest unemployment (37.4 percent) in the country, followed by Rajasthan (28.5 percent) and Delhi (20.8 per cent).
However, some states like Odisha (0.9 per cent), Gujarat (2.3 percent) and Karnataka (2.5 percent) recorded the lowest surge of unemployment in December 2022, as per the data shown by CMIE.
Rituparna Chakraborty, Team Lease Services co-founder and executive vice president, said: “One of the alarming possibilities for India given the leading indicators of birth rate and death rate and economic prosperity is the fact that our addictions to the labor workforce are likely to slow down like it has happened in China or in Europe and other developed economies.” (Indian Express)
Mahesh Vyas, the managing director of the CMIE, told Reuters news agency that labor participation has also increased to 40.48 percent in December, which is the highest in the past 12 months, highlighting that the situation is not as grim as it seems.
“Most importantly, the employment rate increased in December to 37.1 percent, which again is the highest since January 2022,” he told Reuters.
Ritiparna Chakraborty, noted that formal job creation remains far behind what the labor market needs.