In poll year, 1.25mn new jobs to map informal sector

NEW DELHI: Soon, a network of up to 1.25 million people will embark on an ambitious exercise across India’s 250,000 village panchayats or administrative units — mapping the so-called informal or unorganised sector, which accounts for almost 400 million jobs in India according to some government data.

The 1.25 million people will be employed as data enumerators for the Seventh Economic Census, and earn up to ₹100 a day, government officials familiar with the matter said. The significance of creating over a million jobs, if only temporary, in an election year isn’t lost on anyone, but policymakers and statisticians are even more delighted because this exercise will finally assess the contours of India’s vast and little-known informal sector, and provide the data when it is still recent and relevant.according to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), a government body, in 2005, around 395 million of the 458 million people employed in India had jobs with the informal sector. More recent data from NCEUS isn’t available — highlighting why this project is important.the data collected by the enumerators will be uploaded through a mobilebased app that will be linked with a central data server of the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (Mospi), the government officials added.the officials, who asked not to be named, said this will help Mospi get data quickly (and without spending too much money).