India - Employment and Unemployment, July 2011- June 2012, NSS 68th Round

Although it may be theoretically possible that on a particular day of the reference week, a person may have any number of activities, the particulars relating to two activities identified on the basis of priority cum major time criterion need only be considered for making entries in this column. Thus, on a day, a person may either have only one activity with 'full' intensity or two activities with 'half' intensity for each. If the activity is pursued with intensity 'half' on a particular day, the entry will be 0.5 against that activity and if that is pursued with intensity more than half, 1.0 will be recorded against that activity in the relevant columns (7) to (13). Generally, an activity, which is pursued for more than 1 hour but less than 4 hours is considered to have been pursued with 'half' intensity. If it is pursued for 4 hours or more, the activity is considered to have been pursued with 'full' intensity. However, for some persons, less than four hours of work daily is their normal working hours for the work or profession. In such cases he will be considered to have worked with 'full' intensity.

The decision whether the intensity to be recorded for an activity will be 0.5 or 1.0 has to be taken by the investigating staff making careful probes into the actual situation obtaining for the person on a particular day. Mere declaration made by the informants, that less than four hours of work daily is their normal working hours for the work or profession, should not be the basis for recording the intensity as 1.0. In the case of a cultivator, a village artisan or a small trader, it should not be presumed that a few hours on a day, say during the lean periods of the year, is their normal work, and the intensity 1.0 need not necessarily be recorded for them. Since this particular block of the schedule is meant for recording the information on periodical or seasonal under-utilisation of available labour time, careful probes about the nature of work performed by a person during the day has to be made before recording the relevant entries.

To illustrate, in so far as the daily activity pattern of a person is concerned, the following seven different situations can be visualized for a person on a single day:
(i) he/she may be engaged fully in one economic activity;
(ii) he/she may be engaged in two different types of economic activities;
iii) he/she may be partly engaged in economic activity and for the rest of the day he may be seeking or available for work and at the same time may or may not be doing some non-economic activities;
(iv) he/she may be partly engaged in economic activity and during the rest of the day he is not available for work and may be doing some non-economic activities;
(v) he/she may be available for work for the entire day;
(vi) he/she may be available for work for part of the day and for the remaining part he may not be available for work and may be pursuing some non-economic activity and
(vii) he/she may be fully engaged in non-economic activities.

Which of the status codes are to be entered in column (4) will depend on whichever of the above situations are obtaining for a person on the different days of the reference week. The investigator is to first ascertain the exact situation from the informant and will then record the appropriate status code or codes, as the case may be, in this column using the priority-cum-major time criterion. The relevant codes to be used for recording the status are already given. The following illustrations may be noted for general guidance.

(a) A person found to be engaged in domestic duties should not be categorised 'engaged in domestic duties' (code 92) if the person reports that he/she has also been available for work concurrently.
(b) A person engaged in regular salaried/wage employment but currently not at work will be assigned code 71 or 72 irrespective of whether he is engaged in any other 'economic or non-economic' activity.
(c) Unpaid apprentices will be treated as 'students' while paid apprentices will be treated as employees.
(d) 'Free collection for sale' will be treated as self- employment.

Columns (7) to (13): Intensity of activity: For each activity recorded in column (3), the intensity with which the particular activity is performed on the different days of the reference week will be recorded in quantitative terms 'half' or 'full' in these columns. As described earlier, for each activity listed in column (3) either one 'full' intensity or two 'half' intensity may be assigned to a person on any one of the seven days of the reference week. For a particular activity, the recording of entries in columns (7) to (13) should start from column (7) which is provided for recording the intensity of that activity on the seventh day of the reference week, i.e., the day preceding the date of survey. Similarly, the intensity of that activity on the sixth, fifth and earlier days of the week will be recorded in columns (8), (9), (10), (11), (12) and (13) respectively. If the intensity of an activity is 'full' on a particular day, '1.0' will be recorded in the relevant column. On the other hand, if the intensity is 'half', the entry will be '0.5'. If that particular activity is not pursued on some other days of the reference week, the corresponding columns provided in the block for those days will be left blank against that activity. Thus, for each day, for a person, there will be either only one entry with intensity 1.0 in any one of the lines or two entries with intensity 0.5 each in any two of the lines.