The Atlas
What work is, State by State: how many people do it, on what terms, for what pay, and at what kind of work. In 2023-24, 58.2 of every hundred Indians aged fifteen and over were at work, and 40.3 of every hundred women, against 22.0 in 2017-18; of every hundred regular employees off the farm, 53.4 had no social security at all. In 2025, 26.0 of every hundred young people neither worked nor studied (44.0 of every hundred young women), and 4.2 of every hundred aged fifteen to fifty-nine had been trained formally for a trade. Touch a State to read it.
MoSPI, Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2017-18 to 2025, State tables and unit-level records 28039 of 28044 cells MoSPI printed match
- Source
- MoSPI, Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2017-18 to 2025, State tables and unit-level records: the primary unit-level records, weighted as MoSPI weights them
- Checked
- 28039 of 28044 cells MoSPI printed match at the printed precision (PLFS Annual Report 2017-18, Appendix A State tables; PLFS Annual Report 2018-19, Appendix A State tables; PLFS Annual Report 2019-20, Appendix A State tables; PLFS Annual Report 2020-21, Appendix A State tables; PLFS Annual Report 2021-22, Appendix A State tables; PLFS Annual Report 2022-23, Appendix A State tables; PLFS Annual Report 2023-24, Appendix A State tables)
- 59 of 63 cells MoSPI printed match at the printed precision (PLFS Annual Report 2023-24, Statement 9; PLFS Annual Report 2023-24, Statement 6; PLFS Annual Report 2023-24, Statement 7)
- 77 of 87 cells MoSPI printed match at the printed precision (1.1; 1.2; 1.3; 5.2; 5.3; 3.4; 3.1; 3.3; 7.1; 3.5; 11.1; 8.1; 10.2; 10.9; 9.2)
- Methodological notes
- The terms, pay and kind of work of each State are computed from the records with the same estimators whose all-India values reproduce the Annual Report; MoSPI prints no State table of them for these rounds.
- The young, their schooling and training, hours and self-employment pay are read from the 2025 survey, whose design is new: they are given for 2025 alone, and are not joined to the earlier rounds.
A State, wholeWhere it stands on everything
Every measure at once, each on its own strip: every State a faint dot, India the tick, the chosen State in the measure's colour, with the survey's margin where it is published. Right is better for the people counted; for the kind of work, right is simply more. Lay a second State beside it, and each strip says whether the survey can tell the two apart.
Two at onceThe landscape
Every State on two measures, India's values as the crossing lines. It shows which States share a pattern; it draws no line through them, because the survey describes States, it does not say what makes them so.
Every StateRanked, with the survey's margin
Over the roundsSince the first round
Each State in the first round and the round on screen. A line is deep where it moved the way that is better for the people counted, khaki where it moved the other way, and faint where the change is within the survey's margin.
The atlas as dataEvery State, every measure
Sort by any column; download the table, its source named in the file.
Reading the atlasWhat it measures, and what it cannot
Work is judged here by what it lets people be and do: whether there is work, whether it can be found, whether a regular job comes with the protections the law intends, what it pays, and whether it is on the farm, in the factory or on the building site. These are measures the survey can make well, State by State. They are not folded into one score: a State can pay well and protect few, and a single number would hide which.
The young, their schooling and their training, the hours people work and what self-employment pays come from the 2025 survey, whose design is new. They are read for 2025 alone and not set beside the earlier rounds, whose measures stop at the round before; each is checked, at all India, against what MoSPI's press note prints, in the 2025 tables.
The survey is drawn to speak for States. The district atlas goes closer in, each district with its own margin of error, and marks those the survey cannot read.