Payroll data and formal employment

We do need multiple sources of data on formal employment to be able to properly judge its significance and growth

The government of India has started producing monthly estimates of payroll count derived from the database maintained by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EFPO), which manages social security funds of workers in organised/semi-organised sectors. It recently released the first set of provisional estimates for the six-month period from September 2017 to February 2018. These show that during the six-month period, the new EFPO enrolment of employees was 3.11 million (3.27 million, according to a later release). Several commentators have cited this figure to claim that formal jobs increased very rapidly in the last six months. Far from being jobless, they