India labour data overhaul targets gig work and unpaid activity

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India labour data overhaul

Highlights

India's ministry of statistics proposes overhauling the periodic labour force survey to better identify gig workers and unpaid household activities, targeting rollout in January 2027.
The proposed survey revisions may create a separate category for digital platform workers, who are estimated at 2 per cent of the national workforce.
Changes to labour statistics methodology could impact comparability over time and require greater transparency on classification and headline indicators amidst ongoing data quality scrutiny.

Survey redesign and classification questions

As reported by Financial Times, India’s ministry of statistics wants to modify the periodic labour force survey in two main ways, by improving the identification of gig workers and by recording unpaid household work such as caregiving and volunteering.

Because gig work is becoming a larger source of income, especially in urban India, the ministry proposes adding questions to identify households where at least one person has worked through a digital platform in the past year. The government’s economic survey published earlier this year says gig workers could make up 2 per cent of the national workforce. The ministry has collected information on digital platform workers on an experimental basis since January 2026, but says the current sampling method does not capture enough of them, prompting the proposal for a separate category.

The second proposed change covers unpaid work including cooking, cleaning, childcare and care for elderly or sick relatives. The ministry’s concept note says the objective is to measure these activities, not necessarily to classify them as employment, but it does not set out how economic production will be separated from unpaid domestic activity. The existing survey already counts unpaid helpers in household enterprises and family farms as self-employed, treating that labour as employment even when no wages are paid.

Implications for labour statistics and policy debate

Changes to sampling and questionnaires can significantly alter labour statistics, making it harder to compare results over time and to distinguish real labour market shifts from methodological effects.

This sensitivity is particularly important in India, where the quality of official economic data has faced repeated scrutiny in recent years. Labour market figures carry heavy social and political weight because unemployment remains a major issue, and headline numbers do not always appear to match conditions on the ground. Greater transparency on classification, revisions to existing series and the meaning of published headline indicators will be essential if the new framework is introduced in January 2027.

In our earlier article on India’s widening merchandise trade deficit in September, we outlined how imports continued to outpace exports, pushing the gap to about $30.2 billion. We also noted that elevated energy costs were a key driver of the higher import bill and that India was pursuing export-market diversification through new and advancing trade agreements.

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