“This signals that more people who are willing to work are able to find employment,” the CMIE said, adding that a major share of this addition to the workforce happened in the March 2023 quarter.
According to CMIE, employment in India increased from 404.3 million in the December 2022 quarter to 410.1 million in the latest quarter of March 2023, an addition of over 5.8 million people, on the back of an increase in labour participation as well as a fall in unemployment in the country.
As a result, the employment rate in the March 2023 quarter increased to 36.9% as against 36.6% in the December 2022 quarter, CMIE said in its weekly labour market analysis.
As per the CMIE data, around 3.9 million people joined the labour force in the March quarter, which is drastically lower than the numbers recorded previously.
However, there was a significant fall in unemployment in the March 2023 quarter with the number of unemployed persons down by close to 2 million, from 36.1 million in the December 2022 quarter to 34.2 million in the March quarter.
“As a result, the unemployment rate in the country climbed down to 7.7% from 8.2%,” it said, adding that the increase in the size of the labour force and the fall in unemployment suggests that a large number of people were able to secure employment in the March quarter. Explaining the surge in unemployment rate in the December quarter to 8.2% compared to 7.1% in the preceding quarter, CMIE said that close to 11 million people entered the workforce in the December quarter, taking the total workforce to 440.3 million.
However, owing to insufficient labour demand, 51% or 5.6 million people became unemployed, taking the total number of unemployed persons in the country to 36.1 million compared to 30.5 million in the September 2022 quarter.