It is around 10 a.m. in the morning and Manoj Mandal, 38, and about 50 other people are still waiting for the day’s job at a labour chowk in Bhogal in central Delhi.

“Kaam down chal raha he (There is less work). It’s already 10 and now chances are less that anyone will come here to call us for work today,” Mr. Mandal said, as others around him nodded in agreement.

Even through the Central Government’s data shows that Delhi is among the top five states performing well in terms employment rates, interviews with workers, students, government officials, and experts paint a different story of unemployment and job insecurity.

The Central data showed that Delhi’s unemployment rate (UR) – almost halved in just three months from earlier this year and the state had the lowest unemployment in the country. But officials and experts told The Hindu this was not possible.

The latest annual report by the Central Government show that unemployment rate of Delhi increased slightly to 2.1% from 1.9%.

Actions by the state government to generate jobs is also next to nothing, amidst a long-standing power tussle between the elected AAP-led Delhi government and the Central Government-appointed Lieutenant Governor, which has stopped many projects in the national capital.

When asked about the distress on the ground, though Delhi is one of the better off states as per Government data, Arun Kumar, former Professor (Economics) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) said, “There is distress of unemployment across the country. PLFS data includes unpaid work also whereas ILO definition of UR only considers paid work. So, the PLFS data does not accurately capture the state of unemployment.”

Santosh Kumar Mehrotra, a visiting professor at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, U.K., also said that there is a lot of distress due to unemployment and underlined that the ILO calculation was better.

Curious case of unemployment data

As per the Central Government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), Delhi’s unemployment rate (UR) fell drastically to 1.8% in January-March 2024, from 3.3% in October-December 2023. While at the national level it increased to 6.7% from 6.5%, for the same time period.

Commenting on the huge fall, Surajit Mazumdar, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) said that Delhi’s unemployment situation could not be drastically different from the rest of the country.

One plausible explanation is that the Relative Standard Error (RSE) for Delhi’s UR is 18.2%, as per the PLFS data, whereas the RSE at the national level is only 2.7%. But there are three other states with a higher RSE than Delhi, the data shows.

“At the state level, the sample sizes are very small and the chances of inaccuracies in estimates increase. That is why state RSEs are significantly higher than all of India,” Professor Mazumdar said.

A Labour Department official also said that Delhi’s UR could not fall so sharply in just three months, as there were “no big employment generation by the private sector or Government”.

But in the next quarter (April-June 2024), the UR for Delhi increased to 2.5% from 1.8%.

But the annual data for (July 2023 – June 2024), show that the UR for Delhi increased to 2.1% from 1.9% in the previous annual PLFS report. While at the national level, the UR was stagnant at 3.2%.

One reason for this inconsistency in the quarterly and annual data is because both are calculated differently.

In quarterly reports, while calculating the UR, the Government considers ‘current weekly status’ (CWS), which considers seven days preceding the date of survey.

While in the annual reports, what is popularly considered as the UR is ‘usual status’, which considers 365 days preceding the date of survey.

Though the annual report also has the UR data as per CWS, the Government considers the ‘usual status’ data prominently as the UR in their statements. The recent annual report shows that the UR data as per CWS is higher than the UR calculated based on ‘usual data’.

But both Mr. Kumar and Mr. Mehrotra said that the UR calculated as per CWS is a more accurate representation.

Grim placement situation

Mr. Mandal, who hails from West Bengal, has been living in Delhi for 20 years. He said that there was more work before COVID-19 pandemic and now more people head home without work. His concerns were echoed in another labour chowk in Old Delhi too.

But in Delhi, it’s not just daily wagers scrambling for jobs.

Rohan (name changed), from Bihar, moved to Delhi for his Master’s, with hopes of “better job prospects”. A year after he completed his Master’s in Economics from JNU in 2023, he got placed at an MNC, only to have his dreams shattered earlier this year.

“Around 15 of us were placed in the same company. But they kept deferring our joining date and eventually, they revoked all the offers as the economy was bad…” says a dejected Rohan, now aged 24, who wants to “move away from the corporate sector”, and pursue research instead.

This isn’t Rohan’s story alone. Every year, lakhs of students come to reputed universities in Delhi, from across the country, in the hopes of coming out of their cycle of poverty. In recent years, many have ended up in a cycle of unemployment instead.

The large number of people coming to Delhi led to the national capital having the highest population density in the country in 2011.

Multiple students in DU said that they do not get to know about placements, as few companies come looking only in specific subjects.

In JNU, professors said that most placements take place at the department level and many students said that their placement cell is “barely functional”.

The DU’s Central Placement Cell places a few thousand students every year, but this is only a small percent of the total students enrolled in the university. Many students, however, are applying for the Vice-Chancellor internship scheme and the PM internship scheme, saying that there are hardly any jobs for them.

“It is not possible to place thousands of students, hence placements take place at the college level too,” a university official said, adding that placements took a hit during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, at IIT Delhi, officials said that the slight drop in placements this year was reflective of the economic situation. After the commencement of the placement process, an official said, “Compared to the last year where we had around 1287 offers, we had 1215 offers this year”. He added, “Despite the fact that it was a difficult year, we were almost able to match up to the number of offers last year.” However, officials did not share the number of students registered for placements.

Jobs lost during pandemic

The pandemic, not only impacted college placements, but hit other sectors too. Over the past few years, many have been pushed down from a formal job into the gig economy as delivery agents and cab drivers.

Paritosh Sagar, 42, lost his clerical job in a private company during the first wave of the pandemic. After a desperate job search, he began working as a bike-taxi rider for multiple companies such as Ola and Uber.

“I preferred the office job because I have knee pain. But now for around 10-12 hours of harder physical work a day to earn Rs. 30,000 a month,” he said. But from this he has to pay EMI for his bike every month, leaving him with little savings.

No relief from Government

Over the years, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal has been claiming in several election-bound states that they gave 10-12 lakh jobs in Delhi and promised to generate such employments in the other states.

Ten lakh of these jobs were claimed to be generated from a “Rozgar Bazaar” online portal of the Delhi government. However, an RTI by The Hindu last year showed that the department did not have any data on number of people who got jobs through the portal.

The Delhi government in its annual budget announced in March 2022 promised 20 lakh jobs over the next five years, of which five lakh were supposed to come from a Rozgar Bazaar 2.0 portal.

“The original Rozgar Bazaar portal has been non-functional for over a one and a half years now and the plan for Rozgar Bazaar 2.0 portal is also stuck,” a Delhi government official told The Hindu.

The Delhi government is not holding job fairs too, as issues were raised about money spent on previous job fairs, according to officials.

“Last time we held a job fair, we had to do it of our own without any help from the Labour Department. Officials do not listen to us as they know that we cannot suspend or even transfer them as the L-G has all the powers,” an AAP leader said.

Many government schemes have been affected in Delhi as the turf war between the AAP and L-G continues.