Centre to launch Periodic Labour Force Survey soon: Gowda

Bhubaneswar: Encouraging the Odisha government to set up data centres, the Union Ministry of Statistic and Programme Implementation today said it has plans to launch the Periodic Labour Force Survey in order to get indicators like unemployment rate and workforce participation.

"My Ministry is soon planning to launch the quarterly PLFS, which will be conducted by making use of tablets and the same will be guided by computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technique," Union Minister for Statistic and Programme Implementation D V Sadananda Gowda said while inaugurating a workshop on IHSN Toolkit here.

Stating that the project was expected to result in huge time saving and would be performed by the National Sample Survey Organisation, who would track and upload employment data, Gowda said the tablets would come loaded with a schedule of questions and software that would facilitate faster data validation as well as give quicker estimates of crucial indicators like unemployment rate and workforce participation.

Gowda said a focused survey on service sector was being incorporated in the 74th round of NSS during 2016-17 as the sector was growing continuously.

He said the frame for this survey comprises the list of establishments from the sixth Economic Census (EC), available Business Registers (BR) and the list of active private non-financial companies with some axillary information.

Enterprises maintaining accounts only would be covered and data collection would be carried out under the provision of the Collection of Statistics Act, 2008, he said.

"The experience of this round will be examined with the view to make the survey of the services sector an annual feature similar to the existing ASI (annual survey of industries)," the Minister said.

Noting that collection of large scale data and processing them was not enough, Gowda said data documentation, archival and dissemination was a key responsibility of a statistical organisation.

"As it is important to store and disseminate data among the users, the Ministry has planned a few workshop on various issues concerning data dissemination and guidance to the state governments will be discussed with special reference to IHSN Tookit," he said.

Odisha's planning and convergence department minister Usha Devi, state's development commissioner R Balakrishnan, MoSPI Secretary T C A Anant attended the workshop.