Life in India · Long View 3: The jobs crisis

Salaried jobs in India

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Salaried work is meant to be the good job: one employer, a regular wage, a written contract, a provident fund. Abhishek Waghmare’s page for Data For India goes through what the official surveys record about how many Indians have that arrangement, which jobs the salaried actually hold, and how few of them get the security the label suggests.

Reporting · added 30.09.2026

By Abhishek Waghmare.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Data For India.

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Salary freeze

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Data For India newsletter on what happened to Indian salaries over the decade to 2024. Using the national Consumer Price Index to deflate survey wage data, Abhishek Waghmare found that the monthly average salary rose about 90% in nominal terms from 2012 to 2024 but fell 4% once inflation is accounted for, with high-earning occupations such as software developers and college teachers losing ground while clerks, drivers, domestic workers and garment workers gained slightly.

Newsletter post · added 30.09.2026

By Rukmini S.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Data For India.

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Employment in India

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Who counts as working in India is settled each year by the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the National Statistics Office’s household survey, and Abhishek Waghmare’s piece for Data For India walks through what that survey counts as work and what it leaves out. Roughly 625 million Indians are in the labour force, about 600 million of them working, and agriculture still employs 280 million. The unemployment rate is 3.2%, and it is highest among the young and the better educated.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Abhishek Waghmare.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Data For India.

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India Employment Report 2024: Youth employment, education and skills

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The India Employment Report 2024 is the third in a series of publications on labour and employment that the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi, brings out with the International Labour Organization. It reads the National Sample Surveys and the Periodic Labour Force Surveys from 2000 to 2022, with a postscript for 2023, and finds that unemployment fell after 2019 while much of the new work was self-employment, unpaid family work and a return to the farm. Among young people, the unemployment rate in 2022 was 29.1 per cent for graduates, nine times the rate for young people who cannot read and write, and its reading of the surveys puts nearly 82 per cent of the workforce in the informal sector.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Alakh N. Sharma and Ravi Srivastava and Sher Verick and Balwant Singh Mehta and Tanuka Endow and Diksha Tayal and Shipra Nigam.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to India Employment Report.

The report

Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) – Annual Report [July, 2023 – June, 2024]

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every year the National Sample Survey Office asks a sample of Indian households who worked, who looked for work and who did neither; this seventh annual report covers July 2023 to June 2024 and draws on 4,18,159 people. The share of women aged 15 and above in the labour force rose from 37.0% to 41.7% in a year, while the unemployment rate was 3.2% for men and women alike.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By National Sample Survey Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Annual Report.

The report

Why has female labour force participation in India changed?

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Abhishek Waghmare’s explainer for Data For India follows the share of Indian women who work or look for work from the 1980s to the last five years, and asks where the women who entered went. Rural women who had left farming came back to it, and urban women moved into services. When participation rose among rural women from the 1980s to the 2000s, most of the women added were unpaid helpers in household enterprises; the recent increase has instead come with a higher share of self-employment among women in both rural and urban areas.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Abhishek Waghmare.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Data For India.

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What do India's graduates do?

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Abhishek Waghmare reads India’s official employment survey for Data For India to ask what the country’s 140 million graduates do for work: how many have stepped out of the labour force, how many are looking and cannot find anything, and what the rest do, whether salaried, casual, self-employed or unpaid in a family enterprise. Women are the likeliest to have stepped away from work, many of them citing home commitments, and unemployment is highest among graduates in their twenties, where more than a third of those in their early twenties have no job.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Abhishek Waghmare.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Data For India.

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Press Note on Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report, 2025 [January 2025 – December 2025]

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the National Statistics Office’s annual labour force report, the first to cover a calendar year rather than the July–June agricultural year, and the first drawn from a sample about 2.65 times larger than the old one. It counts 61.6 crore people in work on average during the year, 41.6 crore of them men and 20.0 crore women. Participation was steady at 59.3% and unemployment at 3.1%, and the office warns that the new sampling design may shift the level of the estimates, so the 2025 numbers may not be strictly comparable with earlier annual reports.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By National Statistics Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report.

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State of Working India 2026: Youth in the labour market: Pathways from learning to earning

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University brings out the State of Working India; this 2026 edition follows young Indians from school and college into work, using National Sample Survey and Periodic Labour Force Survey rounds. Its subject is the gap between degrees and jobs. Graduate unemployment runs at nearly 40% among the 15- to 25-year-olds the report tracks, and of young men who have finished school or college only a small share find secure salaried work within a year of starting to look. The jobs added after the pandemic were almost half in agriculture — 40 million of the 83 million added between 2021–22 and 2023–24 — and the report also traces the migration that carries young workers towards richer states.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Rosa Abraham and Tamoghna Halder and Amit Basole and Anand Shrivastava and Anand Kumar.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to State of Working India.

The report

Are young Indians under or overworked? Both are true but AI may change work hours as we go along

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two economists take India’s 2024 Time Use Survey and ask how long young Indians actually work, and find the hours running in both directions at once: long days for some, very short ones for others. Vidya Mahambare and Poonam Munjal draw on their paper ‘Young Adults at Work in India’ to split those hours by gender and by whether the work sits in a formal enterprise or a household one, and to ask what AI adoption may do to the gap.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Vidya Mahambare and Poonam Munjal.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Mint.

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The employment profile of India’s young adults

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Four researchers, two at the Great Lakes Institute of Management and two at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, work through their own estimates from the Time Use Survey 2024 on how India’s young adults spend their working days. The piece belongs in this Long View because it counts hours rather than jobs alone: the time at paid work, the time spent getting to it, and the unpaid time at home that no employment figure carries. What they describe is a young labour market pulled between extreme overwork and underemployment.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Vidya Mahambare and Niharika Gowthaman and Poonam Munjal and Palash Baruah.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to BusinessLine.

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Elusive jobs: how AI will demand even greater patience of India’s unemployed youth

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Vidya Mahambare of the Great Lakes Institute of Management and Asrar Alam of the National Council for Applied Economic Research use Periodic Labour Survey data for 2025 to look at how long young Indians wait for work. In Rajasthan, Assam, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal, two-thirds or more of unemployed young adults in their 20s had been looking for over a year, and unemployment climbs with education; the authors expect AI to stretch the wait further. Women, they write, will be the first to stop looking if the financial return does not justify the effort and time.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Vidya Mahambare and Asrar Alam.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Mint.

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Rosa & Tamoghana on India's Youth Employment Crisis

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kashish Kapoor put questions to two of the authors of Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2026 report: Rosa Abraham and Tamoghna Halder, both economists at the university. The paradox they start from is that graduate unemployment among the youth is 40%, against 3% for illiterates. The conversation earns its place in this Long View where the authors push back on the obvious reading of their own numbers, and where Halder admits he does not know whether a salaried job is still the dream of India’s youngest workers.

Podcast · added 29.09.2026

By Kashish Kapoor and Rosa Abraham and Tamoghna Halder.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Subtext by Zerodha.

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Does India really have the biggest jobs challenge in the world?

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Written by the editor of Life in India for This Indian Life. A World Bank report projects that about 238 million Indians will reach working age between 2025 and 2035, the largest wave of new workers in the developing world. The article notes that the same report cites an IMF study putting the jobs India needs by 2030 at 60 million if labour-force participation stays flat and 148 million if it rises, which largely means more women joining the workforce.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Bhuvanesh.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to This Indian Life.

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Employed women in Uttar Pradesh—what explains such a large increase within less than a decade?

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An opinion piece in Mint by Vidya Mahambare and Vivek Jadhav asks what lies behind the sharp rise in women’s employment in Uttar Pradesh. Working from official data, the authors trace most of the increase to agriculture and livestock, led by self-employment in dairy farming alongside growth in crop farming, and find that industry and service jobs for women remain few. It earns its place in this Long View for the distinction it draws between women finding work and women finding paid, secure work.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Vidya Mahambare and Vivek Jadhav.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Mint.

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Indian farms have been losing their young workers—at a time they need the youth to improve farming

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Vidya Mahambare and Vivek Jadhav go through Periodic Labour Force Survey data to ask who still works on Indian farms, and find that the young have largely left. Writing in Mint, they argue that the renewed official call to move workers out of agriculture would leave farming to older hands, at a time when farms need people who can run a tractor, manage drip irrigation and read soil sensors. Their case is that farm earnings, machinery and the consolidation of small plots matter more than the size of the farm workforce.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Vidya Mahambare and Vivek Jadhav.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Mint.

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Educated Unemployment: Why India’s Youth Are ‘Sitting’

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nilanjana Sen and Avishek Jha did ethnographic fieldwork in Shimla and Meerut among graduates preparing for government exams. They argue that the wait for work has changed shape since Craig Jeffrey described a “timepass” generation in Meerut: young people now “sit”, a discipline that shows their families the money spent on their education was not wasted, and the commercial libraries where they sit have turned that sitting into a business.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Nilanjana Sen and Avishek Jha.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Frontline.

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To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane’s book To Kill a Democracy, excerpted here by Scroll.in, puts India’s jobs crisis at the centre of its politics. Union membership and influence have shrunk, collective bargaining is fast becoming a relic from the past, and formal jobs have grown more casual. Educated young people who cannot find work, the authors write, are raw material for political parties and private armies.

Book · added 29.09.2026

By Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane.

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Raghuram Rajan: India’s Jobs Crisis Needs a New Growth Model

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Raghuram Rajan, the former RBI governor, tells Frontline that India keeps trying to board a bus that has already left, low-skilled manufacturing, and that the jobs will instead come from service work, ranging from low-skilled posts like security guards to moderate-skill ones like cooks and waiters, and from the small-town compounder who could be trained to provide first-line medical services. He wants public money in skills and universities, and he has little patience for production-linked incentives that pick sectors without saying why they were picked. He argues that India is, for the first time, a poor $4 trillion economy, big enough to grow on what its own people buy.

Reporting · added 29.09.2026

By Rohit Inani.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Frontline.

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The Truth About India’s Jobs Crisis

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Vidya Mahambare, an economist at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai, tells Milan Vaishnav why the protests that began over higher education touched a wider frustration about work. She argues that the young have already left farming, that factories stand far from where the workers now live, and that women’s rising employment in Uttar Pradesh is mostly dairy work at home. The conversation opens the sixteenth season of Grand Tamasha, a podcast of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. The transcript is machine-made and may carry errors.

Podcast · added 29.09.2026

By Milan Vaishnav and Vidya Mahambare.

Excerpt quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The report belongs to Grand Tamasha.

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