The government plans to release employment data within five months of conducting relevant surveys, with the goal of eventually aligning these releases with GDP data, according to the Statistics Ministry, which was questioned by a Parliamentary panel about the significant delay in the release of “one of the most important socio-economic indicators” for policymaking.
The Standing Committee on Finance, chaired by BJP’s Jayant Sinha, had urged the Statistics Ministry to reduce the time lags in releasing reports based on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), pointing out that annual and quarterly findings from the Survey, which was introduced in 2017, had been plagued by delays.
Government trying to release Data on time
For example, the quarterly report for July to September 2020 was released in August 2021, while the annual PLFS report for 2019-20 was released in July 2021. G.P. Samanta, Secretary of the Statistics and Programme Implementation Ministry acknowledged the need to reduce the delays and said that efforts to use better technology to reduce the delays were underway.
“It will be difficult to go from the current nine-month time lag to two months in one stroke.” Mr. Samanta told the panel that “we will improve this in the near future in a phased manner, nine months or seven months,” noting that “timeliness is as important as the quality of data to ensure its utility as a policy tool.”
“In the beginning, we can simply reduce the nine-month lag to at least four or five months.” Then, in the long run, align it with the GDP frequency, and that will suffice,” he continued. Mr. Samanta stated that the PLFS data had been released until March 2021 and that data for the next quarter would be available in 15 days.
“Definitely not,” the Secretary said in response to MPs’ questions about the global benchmark and whether the employment data is released once a year. The benchmark varies by country, ranging from two to five months in some cases. We’re working hard to meet that goal.”