Utilising data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the researchers estimate quarterly changes in urban labour market flow over the period 2018 to 2022 and the impact on unemployment rates for men and women. Their analysis provides non-intuitive explanations for established findings as well as points out important questions for further study. Both men’s and women’s unemployment rates have reduced in 2022 compared to 2018, showing rapid reductions following the high levels reached during the lockdown. Women’s unemployment rates have consistently been higher than men’s throughout this period. The gap between men’s and women’s unemployment rates reduced during the lockdown, but has shown signs of increasing since 2021, even as unemployment rates have fallen. For women, flows from the labour force to non-participation play a larger role in explaining changes in unemployment rates as compared to men. Flows from the labour force to non-participation, however, have reduced since the pandemic, providing an explanation as to why labour force participation rates have increased, namely, women staying for longer in the labour force rather than more women entering it. Despite rising labour force participation rates, the gender gap in unemployment rates has risen, in contrast to developed economies.

Authors:

• Paaritosh Nath
• Rahul Menon

This paper looks at a case of rural-to-rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital-labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for, but also because of the farmers’ inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with broader dynamics of agrarian-labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio-political factors at play.

In India, as in many countries around the world, most government jobs are allocated through a system of merit-based exams. Over the past few decades, these exams have become incredibly competitive, at times receiving over 1,000 applications for each vacancy.

Against a backdrop of rising educational attainment, high aspirations, disappointment with private sector opportunities, and a deep unmet need for income security, it is understandable why the demand for public sector employment opportunities is so high.

Yet despite the large footprint that public sector recruitments have in our social, economic and political life, many basic questions about them remain shrouded in mystery. Who applies? Why do they apply? Are these intense levels of competition socially productive, or do they make people worse off? Why are people willing to invest so much in exam preparation? Why are people willing to gamble on such low odds of getting selected?

Our lack of understanding limits our ability to formulate sound labour market policy. As we will see, a large share of college graduates participate in public sector recruitment exams, and candidates for these exams make up a disproportionate share of the overall unemployed population. How can we improve employment outcomes if we do not understand who the unemployed are and how they invest their time?

The main reason for the holes in our understanding is a lack of data. To date, neither private nor public household surveys include questions on whether individuals are preparing for competitive exams; and recruitment agencies have historically been cloistered institutions, understandably concerned about protecting the integrity of the recruitment process. As a result, the crores of candidates preparing for competitive exams around the country remain largely invisible in data, and by extension in policy.

This report attempts to shine a light on this dark corner of the labour market. To do so, the researcher uses several new sources of data. First, he draws on administrative data from a recruitment agency. This data allows us to observe the whole recruitment process for the entire universe of applicants — the first time such data has been made available in the Indian context. 

Second, the researcher uses data from a large-scale survey of over 3,000 candidates, which provides information about their investments in exam preparation, their access to resources, their constraints, and their beliefs. 

Third, the research collaborators and the researcher conducted interviews and focus groups with candidates to better understand them in their own words. These rich data sources provide new insights into the economic and social life of candidates preparing for competitive exams.

The goal of this report is to demonstrate how both labour market and recruitment policy can be informed by a better understanding of candidate application behaviour. This understanding can, in turn, help us tackle some of the key challenges in the modern Indian labour market — high levels of educated unemployment, a lack of skill development, low levels of female labour force participation, and more.

Download the report here

Summary Articles:

VoxDev: The costs of extreme competition for government jobs: Evidence from India

Ideas for India: The costs of extreme competition for government jobs

Further Reading:

Mangal, Kunal (2022a), ​“How much are government jobs in developing countries worth?.” Download here.
Mangal, Kunal (2022b), ​“The long-run costs of highly competitive exams for government jobs.” Download here.

FAQs:

Are the statistics in the report official?

Although the report uses official data, the statistics in the report were not computed by TNPSC. Therefore, none of these statistics are official, and any errors in processing the data are entirely my own.

Is the report written in affiliation with any coaching center?

No. We are academic researchers. No one who was involved in either collecting and analyzing the data had any affiliation with a coaching center.

Will the report be available in Tamil?

We hope to be able to provide a Tamil summary of the report in the near future.

This study examines the performance of MGNREGA during the Covid-19 pandemic in eight blocks across four states of India, viz. Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. MGNREGA functioning is analysed along the following dimensions: overall impressions of the programme among job card holding households, extent of unmet demand, wage payments, changes in programme functioning during the pandemic, and effectiveness of MGNREGA as a safety net. The blocks were chosen from a list of blocks in which Civil Society Organisations part of the NREGA Consortium are working. All blocks on this list were ranked based on their performance in MGNREGA as reflected in the Management Information System (MIS). Highest and lowest ranked blocks were chosen in each state and are referred to as high performing and low performing blocks in the study The blocks chosen were — Phulparas (Madhubani) and Chhatapur (Supaul) in Bihar, Bidar (Bidar) and Devadurga (Raichur) in Karnataka, Khalwa (Khandwa) and Ghatigaon (Gwalior) in Madhya Pradesh, and Wardha (Wardha) and Surgana (Nashik) in Maharashtra. A two stage random sampling was followed in the chosen blocks. In the first stage, five Gram Panchayats (GP) were randomly chosen in each block based on the Census 2011 list. In the second stage, 50 households were randomly selected in each GP from the MGNREGA MIS list of job card holders. The sampling method ensures representativeness of the results at the block level for all job card holding households. The survey was conducted in November-December 2021. Two reference periods were employed. The first covered the pre-Covid financial year (April 2019 to March 2020) and the second covered the Covid financial year (April 2020 to March 2021). This also includes executive summary of the report.

Download full report here

Download Executive Summary here (English, Kannada, Hindi).

Download Press Release here (English, Kannada, Hindi).

Download slides of key results

Press coverage of report findings

Drawing on results from a panel of 2778 workers interviewed during and after the 68-day hard lockdown imposed in India, the following study examines the livelihood impact of the pandemic and the extent of subsequent recovery or lack thereof. Focussing specifically on workers located in the informal economy, the study is a useful addition to the burgeoning body of work on the economic impacts of Covid-19 by providing an insight into the employment and earnings recovery of those located at the margins. These findings are spliced across socio-economic groups to showcase the differential impact of the pandemic on different demographics within the informal sector.

Authors:

• Paaritosh Nath
• Nelson Mandela S
• Aishwarya Gawali

The recently released data from the 2017 – 2018 Periodic Labour Force Survey have created a controversy regarding the quantity of employment generated in the past few years in India. Estimates ranging from an absolute increase of 23 million to an absolute decline of 15.5 million have been published. In this paper we show that some of the variation in estimates can be explained by the way in which populations are projected based on Census 2011 data. We estimate the change in employment using the cohort-component method of population projection. We show that for men total employment rose but the increase fell far short of the increase in working age population. For women, employment fell. The decline is concentrated among women engaged in part-time or occasional work in agriculture and construction. 

Authors:

• Paaritosh Nath
• Amit Basole

Social protection and social security have very limited coverage in India. This reality has not changed since independence, one of greatest failures of the development strategy India adopted in the early fifties. The labour force is predominantly unorganized. As much as 91 per cent of the labour force are in informal employment, i.e. without any social insurance we estimated from the NSO’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (2017−18) (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019). This is barely down 2 percentage points from 93% in 2011-12 (NSO’s 68^th Round). In fact, regardless of the growth rate of GDP, this high share of informality in the workforce had not changed until 2012, and when it fell recently, it did so by merely 2 points. The rest 9 per cent of the workforce has varying levels of social security in the form of provident fund, paid leave, medical insurance and other benefits.

Author:

• Santosh Mehrotra

This booklet is based on a two-year study of domestic workers conducted by faculty at Azim Premji University.

Please share it with friends and family so that more people and employers are aware that domestic workers need to be accorded their due rights and be treated with dignity.

The focus of the research is the work and lives of ​‘domestic workers’ (henceforth, DW) in Bangalore, especially their struggles to form collectives as part of their attempt to transform their subjectivities from ​‘servant’ to ​‘worker’, and improve their life and work situations. Domestic work is precarious work constituting a large part of India’s informal economy. It exists within a political economic context signaled by rising incomes of urban middle and upper classes and the existence of a steady supply of working-class women (from mostly stigmatised castes but across all religions) ready for domestic work. It is also enabled by a cultural-ideological context signaled by the preference to engage DWs as a normalised cultural marker for upward mobility. Our research demonstrates the struggles of DWs, the dilemmas and obstacles they negotiate for their empowerment. It focuses on the collective actions of DWs in their workplaces, their families and neighborhoods, and within unions and labour-NGOs engaged in organising DWs for ​“formalisation” of work, demands for a ​‘decent’ wage and work conditions, and innovations in the form and content of their collective rights.