Urban jobless rate below 7% for the first time in two years: Report

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As the pandemic disrupted operations, the employment prospects witnessed a massive dip.

With a gloomy year gone by, the new CMIE data shows that India’s unemployment rate dropped below 7% in February. This is the lowest unemployment rate in more than two years.

It seems that the demand for workers has started surging and the job market has started working at its full capacity. Although the numbers are positive, economists believe that this data overestimates the health of the job market, according to a report in Mint.

CMIE data shows that the urban unemployment rate currently is at 6.99% while the rural unemployment is at 6.86%. In January, the urban employment rate was around 8.08%. Assam has the lowest unemployment rate at around 1.5%.

Arup Mitra, a professor of economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, told the publication that the market requires a low unemployment rate and high labour force participation. Although the unemployment rate has fallen down, people are opting for sundry jobs due to financial constraints.

Experts also believe that urban unemployment has plunged because of the internal migration that took place at the time of the lockdown. Those migrants who left the cities because of a lack of jobs have yet not returned. The job crisis is still not over.