The latest report of the Labour Bureau is a case in point, which reported 500,000 jobs lost in just three months from October - December 2008, and that too in only selected sectors. Almost same rate of decline in employment was also witnessed in March - January 2009.

This report was released just after the election results were out. People already know about heavy loss of jobs, but they preferred UPA to others to rule the country.

Surprisingly, people did not consider such losses a poor performance of the government because they were much more willing to accept the government's propaganda that it was the impact of global economic slowdown.

Union government on its part has been successfully doing whatever it could to shift the people's ire towards itself to external causes for quite some times.

In the present report, as entrusted by Ministry of Labour and Employment, the Labour Bureau conducted a second quick survey to assess the impact of economic slowdown on employment in India for the quarter January to March, 2009.

The sectors covered were textiles, leather, metals, automobiles, gems and jewellery, IT/BPO, transport sector units located at selected centres, and handloom/power-loom.

The sample has been drawn from 21 centres in 10 states of Haryana (Panipat, Faridabad and Gurgaon), Uttar Pradesh (Noida, Kanpur and Agra); Tamil Nadu (Chennai, Coimbatore/Tiruppur and Erode), Punjab (Ludhiana and Jalandhar); West Bengal (Kolkata and Howrah), Gujarat (Ahmedabad and Surat), Maharashtra (Mumbai and Pune) besides Delhi, Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad); Karnataka (Bangalore) and Union Territory of Chandigarh.

The analysis of employment trends as submitted in the second quarterly report by Labour Bureau indicates that during the quarter October-December, 2008 quarter, about half a million workers were assessed to have lost their jobs in these sectors. However, employment in selected sectors during the quarter January to March, 2009 is estimated to have increased by about a quarter million to 15.72 million. The employment in the selected sectors during March, 2009 still remains lower than employment in September, 2008, when the employment figure was 16.2 million.

Total estimated employment in the sectors covered has increased by 0.6% during January-March, 2009 period. Non-exporting units have shown higher rate (0.92%) of increase in employment as compared to exporting units (0.28%).

Sectors registering increase in employment during January-March, 2009 period are Gems & Jewellery (3.08%), Textiles (0.96%), IT/BPO (0.82%), Handloom/Power-loom (0.28%) and Automobiles (0.10%).

Decline in employment during January-March, 2009 has been observed in Leather (2.76%), followed by Metals (0.56%) and Transport (0.36%).

The increase in employment of direct workers has been observed to be 0.68% during January-March, 2009 in comparison to decline of 0.63% during October-December, 2008.

During the course of the survey, data has also been collected to analyse impact on contractual workers. The employment of contract workers at overall level has remained unchanged during January-March, 2009 quarter, whereas the decline in contract workers was observed to be 3.88% during October-December, 2008.

In view of the contracting and sub contracting of workers in the construction sector and as also non availability of any sampling frame, the impact on employment in the construction sector could not be assessed. Thus the construction sector requires a special study as during both the surveys undertaken by Labour Bureau, difficulties were experienced in the collection of data. The option of resorting to estimates based on employment elasticity to growth is a theoretical option, which would not yield the real picture, the report said.#