Unemployment

Question 1

Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) by and when and what

Answer 1

National Statistics Office (NSO) under Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. The PLFS was designed with two major objectives for measurement of employment and unemployment.
 short time interval of three months for only the urban areas.
 The second was for both rural and urban areas, annual basis

Question 2

All-India Quarterly Establishment-based Employment Survey (AQEES) by

Answer 2

AQEES has been started by Labour Bureau (Ministry of Labour and Employment) to provide quarterly updates about the employment and related variables of establishments, in both ORGANIZED and UNORGANIZED segments of nine selected sectors. AQEES Components:
Quarterly Employment Survey (QES): Covers establishments with 10 or more workers (organized segment).
Area Frame Establishment Survey (AFES): Covers establishments with 9 or fewer workers (unorganized segment).

Question 3

New Pension Scheme (NPS) v/s OPS

Answer 3

Employees contribute 10% of salary, with matching contributions from the employer; enhanced to 14% for Central Government from April 1, 2019.
State govt, individuals, NRIs, corporates can also adopt. Earlier no contribution from employee, 50% of last drawn salary.

Question 4

Sources of Data on Unemployment:

Answer 4

The data regarding unemployment can come from four potential
sources viz. Household Surveys; Enterprise Surveys; Administrative Data and Data from Government
Schemes.
o Household Surveys: Currently, there are three datasets on household surveys as follows:
✓ Employment-Unemployment Survey of NSSO under MOPSI
✓ Annual Labour Force Survey by MoLE
✓ Population/census data from the Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner and
Data from registration with Employment Exchanges. Hence option (d) is the correct answer.
o Annual Labour Force Survey (Labour Bureau)
✓ To obtain more regular data on the labour force, the Labour Bureau under MoLE started
conducting the Annual Labour Force Survey in 2009-10. Four more surveys have been conducted
since then. The most recent one was conducted during 2015-16. The problem with this survey is
that it collects data only for a part of a year and is unable to catch the information covering the
entire year. Further, while the EUS covers the entire population, this survey reports data only for
the population aged 15 and above.
o Population Census
✓ Population Census collects data on main, marginal and non-workers. However, since census data
comes every 10 years, these figures hardly get any attention.

Question 5

EPFO, EPF, and EPS 1995

Answer 5

By default, it applies to establishments with 20 or more employees.

EPFO (Employee Provident Fund Organization):
Oversees two main schemes: EPF and EPS.

EPF (Employee Provident Fund) Scheme:
Both employer and employee contribute 12% of your salary (including Dearness Allowance) towards it.
You can access a portion of the amount before retirement for specific reasons.

EPS (Employees’ Pension Scheme) 1995:
Only employer contributes 8.33% of your salary (capped at Rs. 15,000) towards it (you don’t contribute).
You can receive pension after 58 years of age.