Amid coronavirus lockdown, unemployment rate soars over 23% in last week of March

The pan-India lockdown imposed due to the spurt in confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country may have induced further lowering of the employment rate. According to estimates put out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the overall unemployment rate hit over 23 per cent in the last week of March 2020.

Estimates show that the employment situation worsened from the beginning of March 2020, before the lockdown was put in place.

Mahesh Vyas, CMIE’s chief executive, wrote on the organisation’s website: "In March 2020, the labour participation rate fell to an all-time low, the unemployment rate shot up sharply and the employment rate fell to its all-time low."

"The unemployment rate in March was 8.7 per cent. This is the highest unemployment rate in 43 months…The unemployment rate during this last week [of March] was 23.8 per cent. Labour participation rate fell to 39 per cent and the employment rate was a mere 30 per cent."

"We had feared a fall in labour participation rate because of the national shutdown to contain the spread of coronavirus. But, this fall seems to have happened even before the lockdown," he further stated, adding, "of course, it gets much worse as we move into the lockdown."

Data put out by the CMIE comes from its weekly job surveys. This time around, however, the sample size fell shorter -- for March 2020 is 83,929 observations, compared to the average 1,17,000.

The spike in the unemployment rate is not limited to India, as in the United States too, nearly 10 million workers have filed unemployment claims in last 15 days.