India’s unemployment rate stood at 6.1% in FY18, official data showed, highlighting the challenge that confronts the Narendra Modi-led government. The data isn’t comparable with that of past years, the government contended, in effect seeking to refute previous leaked reports that said they showed the unemployment rate was at a 45-year high. Highlighting the difference between the PLFS and the earlier surveys conducted every five years, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation said the older assessments used paper forms to collect information on different aspects of the labour force. In the PLFS, information has been collected from all members of sample households using the computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) method with inbuilt validation rules through tablets. On this edition of the big picture we will decode the employment data and the way forward.