India’s unemployment rate reduced to 6.86 per cent in September from 8.32 per cent in August as 8.5 million jobs were created last month, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMEI). With construction activities picking up pace again, majority of these jobs were created in rural India.
A report in Economic Times said that the creation of additional jobs pushed up India’s employment rate to 37.87% in September as compared to 37.15% in August. The employment rate in rural India jumped by 0.85 percentage points.
“This is an extraordinary increase in rural India when the demand for labour from agriculture is usually low. While agriculture absorbed an additional 0.55 million during the month, the remaining six million were absorbed in nonfarm rural jobs, largely construction and manufacturing,” the report quoted the CMIE as saying.
The construction industry in rural India, CMIE pointed out, was the largest giver of jobs to additional labour with 7.55 million additional people getting employed in the sector in September “on the back of steady growth in investments in road building and possible increase in employment under the rural employment guarantee scheme the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.”
“Employment in September 2021 is estimated at 406.2 million. This is the highest in 20 months or since the COVID-19 shock in March 2020. It is, however, still lower than the pre-COVID employment of 408.9 million in 2019-20. It is also slightly lower than the September 2019 employment level of 406.7 million,” CMIE said in its report.
“This big jump in September brings salaried jobs the closest to their average in 2019-20, which was 86.7 million,” it added.
However, urban regions reported the unemployment rate at 8.62 percent, compared to rural areas at 6.06 percent in September.
The unemployment rate in the country had reached 11.84 percent in May — the highest in 2021 amid the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic. This was the time when the urban areas reported unemployment rates as high as 14.72 per cent. The rural areas had the unemployment rate of 10.55 per cent.
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