UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 112 of 150

Correct — A, Usual status unemployment. India's employment-unemployment surveys — the old NSSO quinquennial rounds and today's Periodic Labour Force Survey — classify a person's activity against three different reference periods, and the phrase 'major part of the year' is the signature of the first of them. Under the usual status approach the reference period is the 365 days preceding the survey, and a person is assigned the activity on which he or she spent the relatively longer time, the 'major time criterion'. Someone who was in the labour force but without work for the major part of those 365 days is counted as usually unemployed. Because it needs joblessness to persist across most of a year, this measure captures chronic or open unemployment and yields the lowest of the three unemployment estimates.

• (b)Daily status unemployment — Current Daily Status uses a reference period of just the seven days preceding the survey, and records activity half-day by half-day for each of those days. It is designed to capture the intensity of work — a person can be counted as partly employed and partly unemployed within the same week — so it measures underemployment, not year-long joblessness. It normally gives the highest unemployment estimate of the three.
• (c)Weekly status unemployment — Current Weekly Status also uses a seven-day reference period. A person is treated as employed if he or she worked for even one hour on any day of that week, and as unemployed only if there was no such work but the person sought or was available for work. A one-week window cannot describe someone unemployed for the major part of a year.
• (d)None of the above — This would only be right if no listed measure matched the definition. The 'major part of the year' wording is taken almost verbatim from the usual status concept, so option (a) does match and 'none of the above' fails.

Unemployment in India is not one number but three, because the same person can look employed or unemployed depending on the window you look through. Usual Status (reference period 365 days) is split into Usual Principal Status, based on the activity pursued for the major part of the year, and Usual Subsidiary Status, which picks up an activity done for 30 days or more outside the principal one; together they form the widely quoted UPSS estimate. Current Weekly Status uses a seven-day window with a one-hour work criterion. Current Daily Status records each half-day of those seven days. Since a longer reference period gives a person more chances to be recorded as working, the rates almost always run in the order CDS greater than CWS greater than UPSS. The Periodic Labour Force Survey, launched by the National Statistical Office in 2017-18, publishes usual status and current weekly status estimates and replaced the old five-yearly NSSO employment rounds.

Read the reference period in the question stem, not the vocabulary. 'Major part of the year' is a 365-day idea, so it must be usual status; 'did not work even for an hour last week' is weekly status; 'half-days worked' or 'intensity of work' is daily status. The trap is that 'daily' and 'weekly' sound more precise and therefore more technical, so candidates pick them for a question that is actually about the longest window. Remember also that usual status is the mildest test of unemployment — you must be jobless most of the year to be counted — which is why the usual status rate is the smallest number the government reports.

• Usual Status: reference period 365 days; activity decided by the major time criterion; captures chronic or open unemployment
• Usual Status has two components — Usual Principal Status (major part of the year) and Usual Subsidiary Status (an activity of 30 days or more); together they give UPSS
• Current Weekly Status: reference period of 7 days, with employment recorded if the person worked for even one hour on any day of the week
• Current Daily Status: activity recorded half-day-wise for each of the 7 days; the best available measure of underemployment and normally the highest rate
• The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the National Statistical Office, begun in 2017-18, replaced the quinquennial NSSO employment-unemployment rounds

• Choosing 'daily status' because it sounds the most exact — it is the shortest window, not the longest
• Forgetting that under weekly status even one hour of work in the reference week makes a person employed
• Comparing unemployment rates from different status concepts, or from PLFS and older NSSO rounds, as if they were one series

UPPSC asks for the definition behind a named status concept or for the survey agency, while UPSC prefers the conceptual cousins — what disguised unemployment means, or what happens to measured unemployment when the reference period changes.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In India's labour force surveys, the reference period for the Current Weekly Status (CWS) measure of unemployment is:

  • (a)One day
  • (b)Seven days
  • (c)Thirty days
  • (d)Three hundred sixty-five days

  Answer(b) seven days — a person who worked even one hour on any day of that week is counted as employed.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following measures normally yields the highest unemployment rate for India?

  • (a)Usual principal status
  • (b)Usual principal and subsidiary status
  • (c)Current weekly status
  • (d)Current daily status

  Answer(d) current daily status — because it records activity half-day-wise it also picks up underemployment, so it exceeds the weekly and usual status rates.