The story so far: On June 14, the National Statistical Office (NSO), which functions under the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, released the annual report on the basis of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted during July 2020-June 2021. Though conducted amid the first lockdown, the survey said the unemployment rate saw a decrease from 4.8% in 2019-20 to 4.2% in 2020-21, meaning that 4.2% of adults who looked out for jobs could not get any work in rural and urban areas of the country in 2020-21. In rural areas, the rate is 3.3% while in urban areas the unemployment rate was recorded at 6.7%. This report, which also gave details of internal migration, said 11.8 people out of 100 samples migrated to other States during the period of survey.
What is the methodology of the PLFS?
The fieldwork of PLFS was suspended twice during the survey in March 2020 and in April 2021 due to COVID-19. A rotational panel sampling design has been used in urban areas, which means each selected household in urban areas is visited four times. There was, however, no revisit in rural areas and the samples were drawn randomly in the form of two independent sub-samples. The sample size for the first visit during July 2020-June 2021 in rural and urban areas was 12,800 first-stage sampling units (FSUs) consisting of 7,024 villages and 5,776 urban frame survey blocks. Out of this, 12,562 FSUs (6,930 villages and 5,632 urban blocks) were surveyed for canvassing the PLFS schedule. The number of households surveyed, according to the NSO report, was 1,00,344 (55,389 in rural areas and 44,955 in urban areas) and the number of persons surveyed was 4,10,818 (2,36,279 in rural areas and 1,74,539 in urban areas). The PLFS gives estimates of key employment and unemployment indicators like the Labour Force Participation Rates (LFPR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Unemployment Rate (UR)