'Primitive' assumptions don't alter our payroll results

Even if we assume formalisation pushed up the formal employment, can we deny we were under-reporting such payroll data earlier?

We would like to thank the two articles that came in the last couple of days as a commentary on our recently released payroll report. The critics make us feel better about the deep impact and potential of our work in the employment scenario and broadly in India’s policy making as this is probably the first use of data-driven insight in policy decision, contrary to the usual speculative and impressionist policy analysis rampant in the public domain.

While some of the assumptions are being coined “primitive” (including one in this paper on January 23), in our opinion the assumptions are a