Estimating Women’s Employment: The Role of NSSO in India

Measuring how many women in India actually work is harder than it sounds. A woman who weeds the family field in the morning, stitches blouses on order in the afternoon, and helps run a tiny tea stall in the evening may not show up as a “worker” in official data at all. This is where the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) steps in. Through its large-scale surveys, the NSSO has, for decades, provided the most detailed picture available of who works in India, in what conditions, and for how long, and its findings on women’s employment continue to shape policy debates today.

What the NSSO is and what it does 🔗

The NSSO, now functioning as part of the National Statistical Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, was set up in 1950 to conduct nationwide household sample surveys on socio-economic issues. Its surveys are organised in numbered “rounds”, each typically lasting a year and focusing on specific themes such as consumer expenditure, health, education, manufacturing, or employment and unemployment.

The Employment and Unemployment Surveys (EUS) of the NSSO are particularly important for studying women’s work. They use a stratified, multi-stage sample design covering both rural and urban areas, and apply standardised concepts like Usual Principal Status, Usual Subsidiary Status, Current Weekly Status, and Current Daily Status to classify a person’s activity. These concepts allow researchers to capture work that is regular, occasional, seasonal, or done only for a few hours a week, which matters greatly when measuring female employment.

Why annual surveys matter 🔗

The Census of India happens only once every ten years. Between two Censuses, the economy and labour market can change dramatically, especially for women whose participation responds quickly to economic shocks, agricultural cycles, household incomes, and social norms. The NSSO bridges this gap by running quinquennial “thick” rounds on employment and unemployment, supplemented by smaller annual “thin” rounds. Since 2017-18, this role has been continued through the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), which uses much of the same methodology established by the NSSO.

Key NSSO rounds for understanding women’s work 🔗

Three rounds are repeatedly cited in studies on women’s employment: the 55th, 56th, and 61st.

The 55th round (1999-2000) 🔗

The 55th round was a landmark because, for the first time, the NSSO carried out an integrated survey covering a wide spectrum of non-agricultural enterprises in the informal sector, alongside its regular employment and unemployment schedule. This made it possible to look at where women workers were concentrated, what kinds of enterprises employed them, and how stable that work was. The round revealed that a very large share of female non-agricultural workers were absorbed not in factories or offices but in tiny informal units.

The 56th round (2000-2001) 🔗

The 56th round focused specifically on unorganised manufacturing in India, classifying enterprises into three categories: Own Account Manufacturing Enterprises (OAMEs), which run without any hired worker on a regular basis; Non-Directory Manufacturing Establishments (NDMEs), which employ fewer than six workers including hired hands; and Directory Manufacturing Establishments (DMEs), which employ six or more. This three-way classification became the standard lens for examining informal manufacturing and exposed how the female workforce clustered in the smallest, most invisible units.

The 61st round (2004-2005) 🔗

The 61st round is widely treated as a benchmark for women’s employment because it recorded one of the highest female Worker Population Ratios in the post-liberalisation period. Subsequent rounds, particularly the 66th (2009-10) and 68th (2011-12), showed a sharp and much-debated decline. World Bank researchers estimate that female workers increased by roughly 26 million between 1999-2000 and 2004-05, before falling steeply afterwards. The 61st round therefore became the reference point against which later trends in female labour force participation are measured.

NSSO versus Census: comparing Work Participation Rates 🔗

The Work Participation Rate (WPR), simply the share of the population that is working, is reported by both the NSSO and the decennial Census, but the two sources rarely match. The differences are systematic and tell us a lot about how women’s work gets counted, or missed.

Different definitions, different numbers 🔗

The Census uses a relatively short reference period and a binary classification of “main” and “marginal” workers based on whether a person worked for 183 days or more in the year. The NSSO, by contrast, applies multiple reference periods: a year (usual status), a week (current weekly status), and a day (current daily status). A woman who worked only 40 days as a farm labourer would be a “marginal worker” in the Census but a worker under the NSSO’s subsidiary status definition. As Desai and Joshi (2019) point out, however, even the NSSO can miss such workers if interviewers do not probe carefully beyond a single question.

Where the gaps show up 🔗

Studies comparing the two sources find that the NSSO usually reports a higher female WPR than the Census, mainly because subsidiary status captures part-time and seasonal work that the Census often classifies as “non-work” or domestic duty. In rural India, where many women combine farm labour, animal husbandry, and household enterprise work, the gap is especially large. According to Census 2011, the WPR for women stood at 25.51 percent, only marginally different from the 25.63 percent recorded in 2001, while NSSO rounds during the same period showed sharper movements both upward and downward.

The “unpaid work” problem 🔗

Both sources struggle with a single deep issue: unpaid work. The NSS Time Use Survey of 2019 reported that more than 90 percent of women in India participated in unpaid domestic work, compared with about 27 percent of men, while only 22 percent of women were counted in employment-related activities against 71 percent of men. Critics argue that the way the NSSO’s main employment questionnaire is framed pushes women whose primary self-description is “housework” out of the worker category, even when they also produce goods or services for the household economy. This shapes the headline numbers we see and feeds into a long-running debate about whether India’s female labour force participation rate is genuinely low or only appears low because of measurement.

Informal sector employment: what the NSSO reveals 🔗

One of the NSSO’s most important contributions has been to make the informal sector visible. Women workers, in particular, are heavily concentrated in informal arrangements that other data sources tend to overlook.

The dominance of OAMEs 🔗

NSSO surveys of unorganised manufacturing show that Own Account Manufacturing Enterprises – household-based units with no regular hired workers – dominate the landscape both in rural and urban areas. NDMEs and DMEs are more concentrated in urban areas. The gender distribution of workers across these categories is striking. In OAMEs, especially in rural areas, the share of female workers is much higher than in NDMEs or DMEs, where hired employment is more common. In other words, the moment an enterprise grows large enough to hire workers regularly, women tend to disappear from its workforce.

What this concentration means 🔗

This pattern matters because OAMEs are typically the most fragile units in the manufacturing landscape. They have very low productivity, almost no access to formal credit, depend on family labour, and operate from the home or attached structures. Sectors such as home-based work, including beedi rolling, agarbatti making, garment stitching, and food processing, absorb large numbers of women. The NSSO captures these workers through two-stage questions about place of work and sub-contracting, allowing researchers to identify own-account workers, employers, and unpaid family workers within the home-based segment.

Implications for policy 🔗

If most working women are in OAMEs, then policies aimed at “formal sector” job creation, factory employment, or large-firm incentives will reach only a small fraction of them. Interventions need to target home-based and own-account workers directly: better access to credit, child care, social security, market linkages, and protection against exploitative sub-contracting. NSSO data have provided the empirical base for many such policy demands, including the recognition of unorganised workers under specific welfare schemes.

Strengths and limitations of NSSO data 🔗

The strengths of the NSSO are well established: a long time series, a transparent sampling design, comparability across rounds, and detailed cross-tabulations by sex, region, social group, and industry. Researchers worldwide rely on these datasets for studying poverty, consumption, employment, and informality in India.

The limitations, however, are equally important when it comes to women. The questionnaire was designed in an era when the “male breadwinner” model was implicitly assumed, and it has changed only marginally since. A single respondent often answers for all household members, which means a male head may underreport the work done by women in the household. Activities that blur the boundary between household chores and economic production – kitchen gardens, livestock care, food processing for sale – are particularly vulnerable to misclassification. Comparisons of rural and urban WPR across rounds show that the gender gap in WPR widened from about 24 percentage points in 1983 to 36 percentage points in 2017-18, partly reflecting real economic shifts and partly the persistence of these measurement issues.

From NSSO to PLFS: continuity and change 🔗

Since 2017-18, the Periodic Labour Force Survey has taken over the role of producing regular employment estimates. The PLFS retains much of the NSSO’s conceptual framework – usual status, current weekly status, the distinction between principal and subsidiary activities – but provides annual rural-urban estimates and quarterly urban estimates. For students of women’s work, this means that NSSO rounds remain the essential reference for understanding trends up to 2011-12, while the PLFS provides the more recent picture, with the caveat that comparability across the two systems is not perfect.

What do you think? If a woman spends most of her day caring for livestock, processing food for the family, and occasionally stitching clothes for neighbours in return for money, should our official statistics count her as a “worker”? And how might the design of the NSSO questionnaire itself be reshaping our understanding of India’s female labour force?

References

1. https://mospi.gov.in/national-sample-survey-officenSSO
2. https://www.dataforindia.com/plfs-explainer/
3. http://www.icssrdataservice.in/datarepository/index.php/catalog/57/download/718
4. https://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/479_final.pdf
5. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/559511491319990632/pdf/WPS8024.pdf
6. https://www.ijsdr.org/papers/IJSDR1907032.pdf
7. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/reconceptualising-womens-work-national-sample-survey
8. https://www.wiego.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Raveendran-HBW-India-WIEGO-SB10.pdf
9. https://library.iimb.ac.in/nsso
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7539753/