India has proposed changes to its employment survey to better capture digital platform gig and unpaid work, the statistics ministry said on Friday.
The revisions come amid a debate over whether the official jobs data reflects underemployment and the quality of jobs in the world’s most populous country, where the headline unemployment stands at 5%.
While changes to the Periodic Labour Force Survey will affect comparisons with past data, India is aiming to tweak how it defines and measures employment while expanding the ambit of the survey.
The survey will add a separate category for digital platform workers as the existing method did not capture enough of them, the ministry said.
As part of this, it will ask a wider set of respondents across rural and urban households if members are engaged in digital platform work.
India has seen a 55% increase in gig workers in the five years to 2025-26, the government’s economic survey said in January, estimating that such workers may make up 2% of the total workforce in the country.
Measuring Unpaid Work
The changes proposed to the jobs survey will also measure activities that are usually not paid for, including production of goods for own use, household and caregiving activities, volunteer and unpaid trainee work.
“This initiative to estimate platform gig workers is a half-step as there are a large number of informal gig workers who are not on any platform,” said K.R. Shyam Sundar, a labour economist and a former professor at XLRI Jamshedpur.
“However, capturing unpaid work in the PLFS survey is an important step … and could eventually lead to changes in the methodology used to calculate national income as well.”
The changes will kick in from January 2027, with fresh samples for 2027-28. The government has invited public and expert feedback on the proposals within 15 days.
(Reporting by Shubham Batra in New Delhi; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Harikrishnan Nair)
