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 40.3%.
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. Atlas measures use PLFS July 2023–June 2024; the story and data bank use PLFS January–December 2025.
Explore the multidimensional research layers produced from official unit-level survey microdata.
The 40% Fraud: How 950 billion hours of stolen women's time subsidize India's low-wage economy. A microdata audit across 10.21M diary slots and 1.15M PLFS records reconstructing the 219-minute second shift, the ₹38 lakh crore unpaid care subsidy, and the collapse of real female paid wages.
Read Flagship Investigation →Fifty years of factory industrialization, capital deepening, and the shrinking factory wage share. Features paired within-plant wage penalties across 16,896 factories, 24-sector matrix, interactive state calculator, and full NIC/NCO concordance crosswalks.
Read Flagship Story →A state-by-state capability matrix from PLFS July 2023–June 2024, 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 descriptive divide separates male (79.1%) and female (40.0%) labour force participation. In urban centres, female LFPR is 27.7% and the urban gender wedge is 48.5 p.p.
View Gender Analysis →In the PLFS July 2023–June 2024 atlas, only 34.1% of regular salaried employees possess the basic security bundle of a written contract, paid leave, and statutory social security. That is an All-India design-weighted estimate, not a state cell.
View Job Quality Metrics →Participation remains stratified by social group. Scheduled Tribes exhibit higher participation (73.1% LFPR) alongside a large self-employment base, while Scheduled Castes show the highest casual-labour share (34.5%) in the 2025 extract.
View Social Group Stratification →The observatory separates PLFS January–December 2025 microdata estimates (story and data bank) from PLFS July 2023–June 2024 atlas estimates. Each module identifies its source and validation status.
Kumar, A., & Pradhan, A. (2026).
Anatomy of Indian Labour: Microdata, Structural Dynamics & Capability Surfaces.
India Labour Observatory.
https://indialabourobservatory.commult / 100. Atlas 2023–24 weight encoding remains labeled until independently reproduced.