Most of the unemployment in India is structural in nature. Examine the methodology adopted to compute unemployment in the country…

Structural unemployment in India arises when workers' skills, locations or expectations do not match available jobs; it dominates because rapid technological change, formal-sector skill selectivity and a large informal sector leave workers in low-productivity activity. Since 2017-18, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) has replaced NSSO's quinquennial surveys, using Usual Principal and Subsidiary Status (UPSS), Current Weekly Status (CWS) and Current Daily Status (CDS). UPSS, the headline measure, classifies a person as employed if they worked at least 30 days in the reference year; this broad criterion can mask disguised unemployment and underemployment, especially in agriculture and informal work. CWS, with an ILO-type one-hour criterion, is closer to current-status standards but not the main indicator; CDS is not routinely reported in standard PLFS estimates, limiting labour-market visibility. Limitations include: until the January 2025 revamp, quarterly estimates were urban-only, so rural labour-market changes were not tracked in real time and the new rural series is still short; informal work is hard to capture; and definitional choices around marginal workers, casual labour and self-employment can overstate employment.

Improvements should include consolidating the 2025 rural extension of high-frequency PLFS estimates, publishing CDS and underemployment indicators, building satellite accounts for informal employment, creating skill-mismatch indices, integrating PLFS with educational and employment databases, and using big data and AI for real-time monitoring. India's measures are ILO-compatible, but the deviation from strict current-status emphasis, using usual status with a 30-day subsidiary criterion as the headline, weakens their ability to reveal structural unemployment. A more frequent, status-rich and skill-linked measurement system is essential for policy design.