What does India’s unemployment rate not tell you?

India's unemployment rate does not count people who have stopped actively searching for work. In today's YOUR INDIA column, Santosh Nair looks at NEET data, youth employment and why headline job numbers may not capture everyone who has fallen out of work, education and training.

A young man in his mid-twenties stopped applying for jobs last year. Not because he found one. Because after two years of rejections, he simply gave up looking.

Ask him today whether he is unemployed, and officially, the answer is no.

That sounds strange, but it is exactly how unemployment is measured almost everywhere in the world, including India. The unemployment rate only counts people who are part of the labour force, meaning they are either working or actively searching for work. The moment someone stops searching, for whatever reason, they quietly disappear from that number altogether. They are not counted as employed. They are not counted as unemployed either. Statistically, they simply vanish.

This is why India’s headline unemployment rate, often reported as a relatively low single-digit figure, can feel disconnected from what people actually see around them, in their own families and neighbourhoods.

Read more: Are we creating jobs, or just creating workers?

Who disappears from the unemployment rate?

There is a different measure that........

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