The Employment-Unemployment Situation in India in the Nineteen Nineties: Some Results from the NSS 55th Round Survey (July 1999-June 2000)

The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has recently released the report containing key results of the NSS 55th Round Employment-Unemployment Survey covering the period July 1999 thru June 20001 .Being canvassed over a separate set of households, the results of the Employment-Unemployment Survey are also free of the controversies surrounding the NSS 55th Round Consumer Expenditure Survey .They therefore provide an opportunity to review the changes in the size and structure of the work force and in the unemployment situation in the country in the 1990s through a comparative analysis of the results of the large-scale quinquennial surveys for 1993-94 and 1999-2000. The analysis will be primarily at the all-India level. But, at this level of aggregation, they have considered separately the four segments differentiated by gender and rural-urban location: rural males; rural females; urban males; and, urban females. The changes in the size of the work force and the underlying work force participation rates, the industrial distribution of this work force, the changes in labour productivity and, the changes in the extent of unemployment and underemployment in the country has been examined. Finally, They examine the changes in the average number of days worked by a worker on the usual status and the changes, in real terms, in the daily average wage earnings of casual wage labourers and in the average yearly "wage earnings" per capita. [Working Paper No. 89]