Team Herald
PANJIM: Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) report on unemployment rate in Goa is unrealistic and unreliable as it is fluctuating too erratically every month.
Reacting to monthly unemployment rate of 22.1 per cent in Goa for March 2021 as released by the CMIE, Sawant said similar media reports appeared in December 2019 wherein the unemployment rate was pegged at 34.5 per cent by the CMIE for Goa. The State government had raised its apprehensions about the process adopted by the organisation while arriving at the figures when they earlier reported unusual and erratic unemployment rate. It is also clarified that the same organisation reported monthly unemployment rate of 10 per cent at the peak of COVID in June 2020; 10.9 per cent in October 2020 and 2.8 per cent in February 2020.
Sawant further said that the CMIE website https://unemploymentinindia.cmie.com/ mentions that “this is the first instance of a private agency producing an unemployment measure for any country in the world. This is also the first instance of the generation of fast-frequency measure of unemployment.”
The Chief Minister stated that the organisation had also added “Beta” to the “Unemployment Rate in India” as shown on its website. “Beta” version in software parlance means the version made available for testing. As per their website, the monthly employment rate depends on the sample size of 44,100 households for the whole of India, he said.
Examination of the monthly unemployment rate for the State shows that the rate is fluctuating too erratically from month to month and seems unrealistic and unreliable, Sawant said.
