Employment and Unemployment Survey, January 2004 - June 2004

NSS 60th Round

In the present survey, there was a significant change in respect of the procedure of data collection and content of information as compared to the earlier annual rounds. Planning Commission, this time, submitted their additional requirement of measuring employment and unemployment in terms of current daily status approach. They also stressed the requirement of collecting information in respect of formal vocational training received by the youth to assess its volume and structure for future manpower planning, besides collecting information from persons who were unemployed on all 7 days preceding the date of survey on their employment, if any, in the past, status and industry of work, reason for quitting the job, etc. that were generally collected in the quinquennial rounds. These requirements of Planning Commission necessitated the designing of a separate schedule (Schedule 10) for collection of information on employment and unemployment situation in order to release the burden of the schedule meant for gathering information on household consumer expenditure. Therefore, the schedule on employment and Unemployment was canvassed in a separate set of sample households.

Summary description of the schedule

In the present round, Schedule 10 on employment-unemployment consists of 11 blocks. Of these, five blocks are similar to the ones used in usual NSS rounds. The first three blocks, viz. Blocks 0, 1 and 2, are used to record identification of sample households and particulars of field operations, as is the common practice in usual NSS rounds. Similarly, the last two blocks, viz., Blocks 9 & 10, are again the usual blocks to record the remarks of investigator and comments by supervisory officer(s), respectively. Of the remaining 6 blocks, Block 3 is for recording the household characteristics like household size, household industry, occupation, religion, social group, household type, land possessed and monthly household consumer expenditure, etc. Block 4 is for recording the demographic particulars as well as the usual principal activity and usual subsidiary activity particulars of all the household members.

The daily time disposition for different activities for each of the seven days prior to the date of survey along with the particulars of the activities will be recorded for each of the household members in Block 5. Further, the current weekly status (cws) will be derived from the daily time disposition data and will be recorded in this block. In addition, for the regular salaried/wage employee and casual labourers, wage and salary earnings will also be collected in this block. Block 6 is for recording the responses to the probing questions for those who were unemployed on all the seven days of the reference week. Such persons will be identified on the basis of duration of unemployment during the reference week recorded in Block 5.
Particulars of formal vocational training received by household members of a specified age-group and educational standard will be collected in the employment-unemployment schedule of NSSO for the first time. In Block 7, particulars of vocational training such as 'description of the field of training', 'name and address of agency from where training received', 'duration of the training' etc. will be collected. Block 8 is a worksheet to obtain the monthly household consumer expenditure, which is broadly in line with that used with the schedule 10 in the 55th round.