India unemployment rate: in India, unemployment rate report rose higher to 7.45% in February 2023. That is 0.31% higher than the 7.14% in January 2023. This has placed the total number of unemployed citizens within the workforce age in the country at 33 million compared to 31.5 million in January.
Labour Market Analysis on India’s unemployment rate
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) monthly labour market analysis, February 2023 saw a marginal improvement in India’s labour participation rate to 39.92% in February compared to 39.8% in January 2023 resulting in an increase in the labour force from 440.8 million to 442.9 million.
The Unemployment rate in rural India climbed up from 6.48% in January to 7.23% in February, which is an addition of 2.3 million unemployed people in the rural workforce, bucking the trend over the last few months.
“This rise in unemployment in February comes as a surprise because rural unemployment was on a downward trajectory in the preceding four months,” CMIE said.
New Jobs Secured against India’s unemployment rate
However, only around 0.6 million were able to secure employment while the remaining 1.5 million people were rendered unemployed. This explains the increase in the unemployment rate in February,” it said.
Rural-Urban Job Gap Ratio
According to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), in December 2022, the unemployment rate in urban India was 2.65 percentage points, which is higher than the unemployment rate in rural India. This difference fell to 2.07 percentage points in January 2023, and further to 0.7 percentage points in February though the urban unemployment rate in India continues to be higher than the rural unemployment rate, it added.
The February report of the CMIE is interesting in that the difference in unemployment rates between rural and urban India has been on a decline in the past three months.
The urban unemployment rate, however, fell from 8.55% in January to 7.93% in February, this indicates a fall in the number of unemployed persons by around 0.73 million to 11.3 million unemployed people in February which is as strong as that of the United States’s Labour Report.
