About the observatory
An independent, open observatory of Indian work: who does it, on what terms, and who decides. It reads the national surveys from the records themselves, and publishes what they say for anyone to read and check.
WhyAn observatory of Indian work
The news of India's labour market usually arrives as one number, the unemployment rate, released and gone in a day. In a country where most people work on their own account, on a family's land, in a shop without a contract or in a house the survey does not count as work, that number hides most of what matters.
The surveys themselves hold far more. Every round, MoSPI's enumerators visit households across every State and ask each person what they did, for how long, and on what terms. The records are public, but reading them takes statistical software, the survey's documentation and many weeks. The observatory does that work once, carefully, and in the open, so that a student, a journalist, a worker or a minister can read the same evidence.
The promisesWhat every number keeps
- From the records themselvesEvery number is computed from the unit-level records MoSPI releases, weighted with the survey's own multipliers. Nothing is modelled, imputed or generated to fill a gap.
- Checked against the printWhere MoSPI printed a table, the observatory reproduces it cell by cell before it uses the records for anything new, and says how many cells match. Where there is no printed table, the figure says it is computed.
- With its margin of errorEach estimate carries the survey's own standard error. Where a sample is too small to tell, the page says so instead of printing a number that only looks precise.
- Seams left openSurveys change their questions and their designs. Where two cannot be joined, the line stops, and the page says why.
- Free to everyoneText and figures are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Anyone may use them, with credit.
The observatory is kept open by its readers. Support it
How we count sets out the rules in full; the methodology defines every term.
The peopleWho keeps it
- Abhinav Kumar Lead researcher Empirical labour economics, digital and platform work, survey microdata methods, and structural transformation in India and the Global South.
- Ananya Pradhan Researcher Labour economics, gender in the workforce, social policy, informal employment, and empirical development studies.
Write to usQuestions, corrections, collaboration
We welcome questions and corrections from anyone, and collaboration from researchers, journalists and public interest groups. If you find a number that does not match its source, tell us: we will check it, and if we were wrong, the correction will say so on the page.