Manish Sabharwal: New Data On Jobs Is Reliable, India Must Adopt IndiaStack For Enterprises

Dispelling doubts being raised about the number of jobs being created in India, Manish Sabharwal, in his column in Mint, has said that there’s no doubt over the job creation data from Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) which showed that 2.2 million jobs were created in the formal sector in last 6 months.

Sabharwal has said that there is no scope of questions being raised about the data as it represents actual money being transferred to accounts linked with Aadhar rather than any survey data. In India, we have four sources of employment numbers - household surveys, enterprise surveys, administrative data, and data from government schemes.

He also said that the news is in-fact positive and significant for the Indian employment industry as it shows a huge increase in formal jobs in the country.

He has called for a separation of fact and opinion and that the new, confirmed numbers will immensely benefit policy makers, researchers and employers.

On informal jobs in the economy, he said that the informal sector shouldn’t be thought of as malignant but steps should be taken towards formal jobs. He said that better labour laws, built over IndiaStack, are required to hasten formalisation.

As of now, only 1.2 million of the 63 million enterprises in India pay EPFO or the Employees' State Insurance (ESI) which represents the huge scope of formalisation in the jobs sector. A single labour code too can help in this direction, he wrote.