E-Paper
Govt to create centralised jobs database
Labour Minister Mansukh Mandaviya leads discussions on creating a centralized job database to address scattered employment data across ministries.
New Delhi Labour and employment minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Friday led interministerial discussions on creating a centralised database of jobs, an idea he broached citing employment data scattered across agencies and ministries, which could be a reason for the lack of a comprehensive picture on hirings.
Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal, Mandaviya and labour secretary Sumita Dawra, among others, participated in a meeting with representatives of over a dozen ministries and agencies. “There is a need to create linkages between different data sources. Data should not exist in silos,” Mandaviya said.
Employment numbers are generated by several entities, such as the Reserve Bank and the ministry of statistics, which carries out quarterly and annual Period Labour Force Survey (PLFS).
Payroll data are also generated or maintained by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, the state-run retirement fund manager, the Employees’ State Insurance Scheme, National Pension Scheme, the state-run think tank Niti Aayog, among others.
“Since several ministries maintain records of employment generated through different federal programmes administered by them, the government could be underestimating total job creation in a given period,” an official said, on condition of anonymity.
While the nodal authority for tracking critical data, such as GDP growth and job creation, is the National Statistical Office of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, the labour and employment ministry is responsible for making policies, such as social schemes, for the workforce.
“The lack of a central database means the government doesn’t have an institutional mechanism to access comprehensive information on jobs data reported by various ministries,” the official quoted above said.
All existing mechanisms of tracking employment, such as the flagship sample surveys of the NSO, will continue.
The plan is to have all employment-data-generating ministries to seamlessly upload their information on to a central portal-like platform so that it is handy and there is no blind spot, the official added.
The labour ministry feels many programmes geared towards the labour market and their contribution in generating jobs are not being tapped because there is no central database with details of all such sectoral schemes. There will be more rounds of meeting to finalise the plan, the official said.
