An open public observatory investigating employment quality, gender divergence, educational mobility, and wage distributions across India. Moving beyond monolithic headline unemployment figures to reveal the reality of work and livelihoods beneath—with official survey design weights, variance bounds, and microdata provenance kept transparent.
Explore how jobs, wages, gender gaps, and formal security shift across India. Select a question below to transform the map, or tap any state to inspect its regional story.
In Maharashtra, 39 out of 100 working-age women participate in the labour force, trailing the All-India baseline of 42.4%.
Select any of India’s 36 States and Union Territories to evaluate its structural capability vector across access, women’s work, earnings, formal security, sustainable hours, and youth training against the All-India benchmark.
Explore the multidimensional research layers produced from official unit-level survey microdata.
A state-by-state capability matrix assessing 36 States & UTs with survey design reliability grading, World Development Indicator (WDI) historical series, and NSDP per-capita scatterplots.
Launch State Atlas ↘An interactive scrollytelling research essay analyzing the educated youth paradox, rural-urban divergence, caste-based occupational stratification, and the 39.1 percentage point gender wedge.
Read Interactive Story →Comprehensive tabular microdata engine covering all 48 analytical dimensions of Indian employment, earnings distributions, education gradients, caste stratification, and spatial rankings with instant search and CSV export for R, Stata, and Python.
Explore Data Bank →Unemployment in India is not a general affliction—it is intensely concentrated among the educated. University graduates face an unemployment rate of 11.2% and postgraduates face 10.0%, compared to just 0.3% for illiterate workers who cannot afford open unemployment without social safety nets.
View Education Curve →A severe structural divide separates male (79.1%) and female (40.0%) labour force participation. In urban centres, female LFPR drops to 27.7%, while rural female participation is heavily driven by unpaid family labour in agriculture.
View Gender Analysis →Even among regular salaried employees, only 49.7% possess the basic security bundle of a formal written contract, paid leave eligibility, and statutory social security—highlighting widespread informality inside formal enterprise structures.
View Job Quality Metrics →Participation and earnings remain deeply stratified by social group. Scheduled Tribes (ST) exhibit higher participation (67.4%) driven by subsistence primary activity, while Scheduled Castes (SC) and OBCs remain disproportionately reliant on casual daily-wage labour with substantial earnings penalties.
View Social Group Stratification →All indicators in this observatory are computed from unit-level NSSO/MoSPI Periodic Labour Force Survey microdata using official sampling multipliers and interpenetrating sub-sample formulas. We do not use proprietary opaque models.
Kumar, A., & Pradhan, A. (2026).
Anatomy of Indian Labour: Microdata, Structural Dynamics & Capability Surfaces.
India Labour Observatory.
https://indialabourobservatory.com