India’s unemployment rate eases to 4.9% in February, beats estimate

India’s unemployment rate edged lower to 4.9 per cent in February, down from 5 per cent in January, according to the latest data released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) on Monday.

The reading was also better than market expectations, with a Reuters poll of economists projecting the unemployment rate at 5.1 per cent for the month.

The decline in joblessness was driven largely by an improvement in urban labour markets and a fall in female unemployment across both rural and urban areas, the monthly bulletin of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) showed.

Urban unemployment fell to 6.6 per cent in February from 7.0 per cent in January, while the rural unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.2 per cent during the period. The data covers persons aged 15 years and above based on the Current Weekly Status (CWS) approach under the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS).

Dheeraj Kumar is a Business Correspondent at Firstpost, reporting on markets, macroeconomics and corporate developments. A postgraduate in English Journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, he previously worked with Reuters’ Global News Monitoring team and has also worked with Prasar Bharati, and PTI. He is an avid reader with a deep interest in philosophy and the evolving role of artificial intelligence in journalism.
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