How the government is masking the true scale of job losses in India’s informal sector
The successive blows of demonetisation, GST and the pandemic pushed lakhs of Indians to self-employment and gig work.
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On July 9, credit markets rating agency India Ratings released a report saying that 63 lakh informal sector enterprises shut down in the country resulting in a loss of 1.6 crore jobs between the financial years 2015-’16 and 2022-’23. The report blamed the downturn on the shocks to India’s economy due to demonetisation, the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The report was based on findings from the annual survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises done by the National Sample Survey Office. A fact sheet of the survey was released by the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation in June, and the detailed findings earlier this month. Curiously, the survey report highlights a rise in the number of informal sector enterprises and workers.
Sunil Kumar Sinha, the principal economist of India Ratings told Scroll this was because the survey report compared the findings for 2021-’22 to data from 2022-’23. Sinha said this comparison does not paint an accurate picture as it compares a period when economic distress due to Covid-19 pandemic was at its worst to a time when the economy started to recover from its impact.
The India Ratings report, on the other hand, compares the 2022-’23 findings to that of 2015-’16 when the last round...
