Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Union Minister of State for Labour & Employment flagged off the field work of the two surveys, All India Surveys on Migrant workers and the All-India Quarterly Establishment based Employment Survey (AQEES) here today. These are two of the five All India Surveys that Labour Bureau an attached office of the Ministry is going to conduct this year. The Minister had launched the software applications for these surveys at Chandigarh in February this year. As a precursor to the launch of field work, the Bureau had also been conducting focused training programs for master trainers and supervisors for these surveys in the past two months.

Speaking on the occasion, the Minister stated that the results of both these surveys will generate highly useful data for effective policy making in the field of labour and employment. While lauding the efforts of Bureau in keeping with the strict and stiff timelines of launch of surveys, the Minister also informed that very shortly the remaining three surveys namely All India Surveys on Domestic workers, All India Survey on Employment generated by professionals and All India Survey on Employment generated in transport sector will also be launched by Bureau.

Shri Apurva Chandra, Secretary, Labour & Employment while expressing pleasure on the flag off of field work informed that the field investigators of these two surveys will be equipped with the latest technology Tablet PCs with software applications for field data collection. He also added that this will be a path breaking integration of IT technology in the field work of a household survey at the national level. He appreciated efforts of Labour Bureau in conduct of five surveys that too all in span of one year .further he lauded the efforts of its  IT support by BECIL ( A Mini Navratna company of GOI)for providing IT support in these surveys.

With the launch of these surveys, the Bureau will cover lakhs of households over the span of next few months to gather valuable data on migrant workers. The Bureau will also cover various establishments under the AQEES to gather data on employment situation and change in employment situation. These surveys will provide crucial data for policy formulation in the field of labour and employment. The AQEES survey holds the objective of collecting employment data on the quarterly basis. It is designed to be Establishment based Employment Survey which would provide on a quarterly basis the employment estimates for establishments employing 10 or more workers and for the establishments recruiting 9 or less workers. This will address a major data gap in the biggest segment of the Indian labour market.

On a similar vein the Migrant Worker Survey is the first focused survey on studying the socio economic and working conditions of migrant workers, it will also assess the impact of COVID19 on migrant workers in India.

Shri. D. P. S. Negi (DG, LBI) expressed his enthusiasm on having met all the deadlines so far and on being able to continue to meet them going forwards for the ambitious project of conducting the five labour related surveys. Shri Negi mentioned that it is for the first time that such IT enabled surveys will be undertaken by an organization on such a large scale. He also informed that this year Bureau will launch and complete five All India Surveys on Migrant workers, Domestic workers, AQEES, employment generated by professionals and employment generated in transport sector. These All India Surveys will generate enormous data for devising the right policies for employment and welfare of labour. “These surveys will prove highly useful in providing Government crucial data on migrant workers and the employment situation in formal and informal enterprises. He expressed his happiness that the bureau is integrating the survey work with latest available technology to achieve timely and faster results.” The results of the two surveys being launched today are expected to be available this year itself i.e. 2021, he added.

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