Every revision of “Where things stand”

The official household surveys count most Indians of working age as in the labour force, with unemployment low, though the survey design changed in 2025. In the 2023-24 Periodic Labour Force Survey, 60.1% of people aged 15 and above were in the labour force, and the unemployment rate was 3.2% for men and women alike. The National Statistics Office changed the survey design for the 2025 calendar year, drawing on a sample roughly 2.65 times larger, and counted 61.6 crore workers on average, with unemployment at 3.1% and participation at 59.3%.

Most Indian workers are self-employed, farming is the largest employer, and most work is informal. Self-employment remains the largest way Indians earn, accounting for 56.2% of workers in 2025, while regular salaried jobs made up 23.6%. Agriculture accounted for 43.0% of all workers in 2025, down from 44.8% the previous year. Across the wider workforce, nearly 82% work in the informal sector and nearly 90% are informally employed, and even among salaried workers only half hold a contract and social security.

Women’s labour force participation has risen sharply over the last six years, and the gap with men remains wide. Between 2017-18 and 2023-24, women’s labour force participation rose from 23.3% to 41.7%, reversing a long drop from the early 2000s when rural women left agriculture. In the 2025 survey, conducted under the new sampling design, women’s participation was 40.0%, compared with 79.1% for men.

The work women have entered is mostly self-employment and unpaid or subsidiary family work, and joblessness among women is highest in the cities. Of the 83 million jobs added between 2021-22 and 2023-24, 40 million have been in agriculture, with women accounting for a large share (38 million). In rural areas, much of this recent entry into work has been in subsidiary work, and in both rural and urban areas the recent rise has come with a higher share of self-employment among women, such as dairy farming in Uttar Pradesh, while in cities unemployment among women stood at 7.1% in 2023-24.

Researchers’ estimates from the Time Use Survey 2024 show that when unpaid household and care work is added to paid hours, employed young women work 9 hours and 31 minutes a day, compared with 7 hours and 57 minutes for young men.

Unemployment is concentrated among the young and educated. More than a third of graduates in their early twenties are unemployed, while joblessness is close to zero for people who cannot read and write. Among young men with a college degree, only 6.7% secure permanent salaried work within a year, the State of Working India finds; Rosa Abraham, one of its authors, says that of graduates who report being unemployed, only 7% secure salaried employment within a year.

The wait for work has reshaped young people’s lives, and some writers link joblessness to political cynicism. In towns like Meerut and Shimla, educated young people spend years “sitting” for government recruitment exams in commercial libraries, taking on prolonged uncertainty to prove to their families that their schooling was not wasted. Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane write in To Kill a Democracy that studies show personal joblessness experience often translates into political cynicism and yearnings for strong-armed leadership.

Factories have created few jobs, and the young have left farming to older workers. Non-farm sectors have created few good jobs: manufacturing value added grew at 7.5% a year between 2000 and 2019 while manufacturing employment grew at only 1.7%, leaving construction to employ 75 million people compared with 65 million in factories. Vidya Mahambare says only 13% of young adults now work in agriculture, down from 34% twenty years earlier, leaving farming to older workers whose median age reached 40 in 2025.

Where the jobs will come from, and how many are needed, is the open question. Raghuram Rajan argues that India cannot rely on low-skilled factory jobs, which he calls a bus that has already left, and must create employment through services, skills, and domestic demand. Under its most ambitious scenario, the State of Working India projects that providing regular salaried work for young people aged 20 to 29 in 2036 would require 103.2 million jobs, while an IMF study cited by the World Bank estimates that India will need 148 million new jobs by 2030 if female participation keeps rising.॥