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The 2025 iteration of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) represents a welcome shift in the Indian government’s efforts to capture more accurate and detailed data about the country’s labor market. Structural changes have been introduced to improve the understanding of employment trends, but despite these developments, the survey continues to miss out on critical dimensions of India’s labor reality. Most notably, it fails to adequately reflect the lives and work of informal labourers, migrant workers, and women engaged in precarious or unpaid labor. These blind spots not only limit the usefulness of the data but also hinder policy efforts aimed at addressing systemic inequalities and ensuring inclusive economic growth.
India’s workforce remains largely informal, with a significant proportion of labourers engaged in unregulated, low-paid, and often exploitative work conditions. While the PLFS has helped in generating broad labor statistics, it still falls short when it comes to capturing the nuanced and often invisible experiences of the informal sector. Precarity, which refers to work arrangements that lack stability, legal protection, or decent wages, is a common feature of the informal economy. Yet, this is precisely the kind of labor that remains underrepresented in national statistics. Workers in such settings often have no job security, face irregular incomes, and are excluded from basic labor protections like maternity benefits, health coverage, or pension schemes.
Among the most overlooked groups in the current survey framework are internal migrants, who form the backbone of several urban and rural economies. Seasonal and circular migration is a key feature of India’s labor market, especially among people from marginalized regions who travel in search of temporary employment. These workers frequently move without formal documentation, live in precarious housing, and engage in physically demanding jobs in construction, agriculture, domestic work, and manufacturing, usually without contracts or safeguards. The transient nature of their residence and work makes it difficult for standard surveys to capture them effectively. Many of them lack a permanent address or are housed in informal settlements, which fall outside the traditional sampling frames of surveys like the PLFS. As a result, their employment patterns and working conditions are rarely reflected in national labor statistics, leading to their near-invisibility in policymaking. This invisibility has real-world consequences. Migrant workers often fall through the cracks of welfare delivery systems, particularly those designed for static populations. Because schemes like the Public Distribution System (PDS), health benefits, or job guarantees are usually tied to one’s home state or district, migrants who move to other regions for work are often excluded. Furthermore, the PLFS does not adequately address the gendered aspects of informal work. Women in the informal sector often work in roles that are unpaid, underpaid, or entirely unrecognised. They are disproportionately employed in domestic labor, home-based manufacturing, caregiving, and agricultural work; areas that are systematically overlooked or misclassified in labor surveys. Despite attempts in the 2025 PLFS to expand the gender-disaggregated data, it still fails to measure women’s contributions fully, especially when such work happens within the confines of the household. The lines between economic and domestic labor blur in such contexts, and the survey methodologies are not yet nuanced enough to draw these distinctions clearly. As a result, women’s work continues to be undervalued or rendered invisible in economic planning and labor policy.
The lack of proper data has serious implications for policy formulation. If the surveys fail to account for the scale and conditions of informal and precarious employment, the resulting labor policies risk being misaligned with actual needs. Welfare initiatives that aim to provide social security, minimum wages, health coverage, or pensions will be ineffective if they do not target the very groups most in need. The exclusion of migrants and informal workers from data sets renders them voiceless in the policy discourse and sidelines their claims for justice, support, and recognition. The structural reforms made in PLFS 2025 are a step forward, but they remain insufficient without targeted strategies to include the most marginalized groups. One solution lies in improving the sampling methods. Rather than relying only on fixed household surveys, data collection must include mobile populations, especially those living in temporary shelters, roadside settlements, construction sites, or labor camps. Capturing the nuances of women’s labor requires a rethinking of survey categories. The survey instruments should include explicit questions about unpaid domestic work, care responsibilities, and home-based income-generating activities. These additions would help reflect the full scope of women’s contributions to the economy and enable more equitable labor policies. It is also important that future labor surveys incorporate modules that reflect the multiple vulnerabilities intersecting gender, caste, and class within the informal sector.Â
In the broader context of India’s economic transition, the inclusion of informal and precarious labor in national surveys is not just a statistical imperative but a moral and political one. As the country aspires to greater economic growth, digital inclusion, and social equity, its policy frameworks must be built on data that reflects the lives of all citizens—not just those employed in the formal sector. Inclusive data is the first step toward inclusive development. Without a deliberate focus on capturing the realities of informal labor, migrant workers, and women in precarity, India risks deepening existing inequalities and missing the opportunity to create a truly equitable labor ecosystem. While the PLFS 2025 makes commendable strides in improving labor data collection, it continues to overlook some of the most critical dimensions of India’s labor force. Migrants, informal workers, and women in precarious employment remain statistically invisible and systematically excluded. Addressing these gaps will require innovative methods, inclusive survey practices, and a political commitment to recognizing the full diversity of India’s workforce. Only then can the promise of equitable labor rights and dignified employment become a reality for all.
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Dr. Sharanpreet Kaur in an Assistant Professor of International Relations at School of Social Sciences, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.Â
