Mumbai: India’s unemployment rate has come down to 6.57 per cent in January 2022, the lowest level since March 2021, after the easing of curbs amid a decrease in cases of Omicron infection. On Wednesday, the NGO CMIE, which monitors the state of the economy, released the January data saying that the unemployment rate has seen a significant decline in this month and it has come down to 6.57 percent. However, the unemployment rate in urban India still remains high.
CMIE said the unemployment rate in urban areas stood at 8.16 per cent in January, while it was recorded at 5.84 per cent in rural areas. Prior to this, in December 2021, the total unemployment rate was estimated at 7.91 percent, in which the rate of urban area was 9.30 percent and the rate of rural area was 7.28 percent.
The lowest unemployment was seen in Telangana in January while the highest unemployment was in Haryana. Telangana recorded 0.7 per cent, followed by Gujarat (1.2 per cent), Meghalaya (1.5 per cent) and Odisha (1.8 per cent). Haryana topped the list with 23.4 percent unemployment rate. After that comes the place of Rajasthan where unemployment stood at 18.9 percent. CMIE had estimated in December, 2021 that the total number of unemployed in the country is about 53 million, of which a major part is women.
On unemployment figures, CMIE Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Mahesh Vyas said that in December, about 35 million unemployed people were actively looking for work and of them around 80 lakh were women. He said that it is important to connect 1.7 crore people who are not actively looking for work despite having no employment.(Agency)