As the summer heat started to rise this April, hundreds of researchers began a trek through villages and cities seeking answers to one of the country's enduring policy puzzles - jobs. The answer could shape Prime Minister Narendra Modi's re-election bid in 2019.
India's most ambitious jobs survey to date will reveal annual employment numbers for the whole country and quarterly estimates for its growing cities. That's a significant change from the current system where the latest numbers are at least one-year old.
"This data will bridge a huge gap," said Pronab Sen, country director at the New Delhi-based International Growth Centre and India's former chief statistician. "This survey will give us an idea of the size of the GDP of India's informal sector - there's no other major economy with such high levels of informality," he said. More than 90 percent of workers exist in the grey economy - unaccounted for in any official statistics - which complicates efforts to track unemployment.
The government has trained more than 700 researchers to feed data directly on to tablets instead of the usual paper questionnaires, according to Rakesh Kumar, additional director general of the National Sample Survey Office.
While India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies, employment creation in eight sectors, including textiles and automobiles, was the slowest in seven years, according to a 2016 Ministry of Labour report. More than 12 million Indians enter the workforce every year, government data show. Between 2011 to 2015, the number of agricultural jobs reduced by 26 million while non-farm ones rose 33 million, according to McKinsey Global Institute.
"The nation will come to know whether prime minister Modi has been able to fulfill his electoral promise of creating jobs," said Satish Misra, an analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. "It will be an answer to India's unemployment puzzle."
Jagdish Thakkar, a spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, didn't return calls seeking comment.
The picture was muddled further in November last year after the Prime Minister overnight canceled 86 percent of currency in circulation.
Yet, there's some apprehension about whether the government will keep to its timetable to release the labor survey. The task force formed last month under NITI Aayog's vice chairman Arvind Panagariya recommended an employment survey every three years.
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