Statistics on Indian Economy and Society

NSSO/Labour Bureau Series on Wages Rates in Rural India

The NSSO/Labour Bureau series “Wage Rates in Rural India” is compiled by the NSSO and the Labour Bureau, Shimla. NSSO compiles these data and publishes them in a quarterly bulletin “Prices and Wages in Rural India (New Series)”. Labour Bureau also compiles the same data and publishes them in the Indian Labour Journal and separately in a publication called the “Wage Rates in Rural India”.

Yoshifumi Usami took the monthly data from Labour Bureau and has digitised them. He has very kindly contributed them to indianstatistics.org.

Download zipped csv file containing monthly data from here. Data taken from here should be cited as follows:

Usami, Yoshifumi (2014), The NSSO/Labour Bureau Series on Wage Rates in Rural India, 1998-99 to 2012-13, Statistics on Indian Economy and Society, http://www.indianstatistics.org/wrri.html

Methodological Notes

Technical Working Group on Rural Retail Prices set up by the NSSO in 1974 recommended that data on rural wages be collected along with data on rural prices. This recommendation was implemented by NSSO since July 1986. However, systematic compilation and release of data started only from April 1998. The series is based on data collected by NSSO along with data on rural prices from about 600 villages. The selected occupations for which daily wage rates are collected every month are as follows:

  1. Agricultural occupations
    1. Ploughing
    2. Sowing
    3. Weeding
    4. Transplanting
    5. Harvesting
    6. Winnowing
    7. Threshing
    8. Picking
    9. Herdsman
    10. Well Digging
    11. Cane Crushing
  2. Non-agricultural occupations
    1. Carpenter
    2. Blacksmith
    3. Cobbler
    4. Mason
    5. Tractor Driver
    6. Sweeper
    7. Unskilled Labour (un-specified)

Methodology for data collection is described here. The relevant section of the Schedule 3.01(R) used for collection of data on wages can be seen here.

The estimation methodology is described as follows:

The daily wage rate data received from the field are first normalized for eight working hours a day. The simple arithmetic average of these normalized daily wage rates is worked out for each of the 20 states. The average wage rates at all-India level are derived by dividing the sum total of wages of all the 20 states by the number of quotations. These averages are restricted only to those occupatio ns where the numbers of quotations are five or more in order to avoid the apparent inconsistency in wages paid to different categories of workers on account of differences in number of quotations. The month-wise average daily wage rates are thus worked out at State level and also at all-India level are released regularly to the users through various sources .

Source: http://labourbureau.nic.in/WRRI_Nov_2013.pdf

It is of note that no detailed survey of employment and wages is conducted among workers to collect these data. Vllage-level officials like sarpanch or patwari are the primary informants for the data for the NSSO/Labour Bureau wage series.

Table 1 shows the number of NSS regions, strata and sample villages for collection of price and wage statistics. For this purpose, within each NSS region, individual districts or groups of adjoining districts are treated as separate strata.

Wage and price statistics are obtained from a constant sample of 600 villages. For each village, a single schedule is supposed to be filled on the basis of information provided by the village official. Actual number of schedules received in any month is a little lower than 603. For example, as seen in Table 2, number of actual schedules received in a month varied between 555 and 571 during July-December, 2012 period.

More importantly, mainly because of lack of existence of a particular occupation in a village in a particular month, the number of schedules containing wage information for a particular occupation can be considerably lower. As shown in Table 2, for male workers, the highest number of observations were reported for masons, carpenters and ploughing workers during July-October, 2012 period. For sowing, weeding, transplanting and harvesting, number of observations in a month were between 200 and 400. For threshing and winnowing, there were less than 200 observations in any month during this period. In case of women workers, for all occupations, information was available from less than 300 schedules. For threshing and winnowing, number of schedules containing information on wages was less than 100 in most months during this period. Information on wages for ploughing workers was reported in a few schedules despite the fact that ploughing (in particular, bullock ploughing) is rarely done by women in most parts of India.1

It is also worth noting that while number of reported observations vary across occupations and States, in some cases, data are reported in all months even for operations like ploughing, harvesting and threshing, which are mostly done only in specific months in a year.

The sample size used for collection of these statistics is remarkably thin in view of the vast and increasing heterogeneity in conditions of rural labour markets.2 Given the informality of rural labour markets, variations across occupations, tasks and crops, variations in implements, techniques and technology, and variations in forms of labour hiring, it is remarkable that the data are collected from only one respondent for every 2.28 lakh agricultural workers in the country!

Such a thin sample survey, using village-level officials rather than workers as informants, is not good enough for estimation of wages when there are wide variations in types of contracts on which workers are hired. Schedule 3.01(R) is designed to collect data on daily wage rates. For occupations that are done primarily or exclusively on piece-rated contracts, a phenomenon increasingly widespread in rural India, hours of work and payments can vary considerably across workers. Using a village-level informant to just fill-in a single number as normal hours of work or daily wage rates is likely to reflect subjective bias of the very few informants that provide data on rural wages.

Table 1: Number of Regions, Strata and Sample Villages for Collection of Price and Wage Statistics, by State, 1986-87 base
Sl.No. State Region Strata Sample village Number of agricultural labourers, 2011
1 Andhra Pradesh 4 18 54 16102617
2 Assam 3 8 27 1814075
3 Bihar (including Bihar) 3 13 39 22171202
4 Gujarat 5 10 30 6481295
5 Haryana 2 4 12 1405956
6 Himachal Pradesh 1 3 9 170279
7 Jammu & Kashmir 3 5 21 498531
8 Karnataka 4 11 36 6737213
9 Kerala 2 5 21 1083003
10 Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) 7 23 69 16586023
11 Maharashtra 6 18 54 12720993
12 Manipur 2 2 9 90644
13 Meghalaya 1 2 9 192223
14 Orissa 3 8 33 6618943
15 Punjab 2 5 15 1474732
16 Rajasthan 4 7 21 4733917
17 Tamil Nadu 4 11 33 8408101
18 Tripura 1 3 9 338922
19 Uttar Pradesh (including Uttarakhand) 5 20 60 19283420
20 West Bengal 4 11 39 9843816
  Total (All-India) 66 187 600 136998308

Note: Number of agricultural labourers refers to total number of main and marginal agricultural workers as per Census 2011.

Table 2: Number of schedules reporting information on wages for different occupations, all India, July-December, 2012
S. No. Occupation July August Sep Oct Nov Dec
  Male            
1 Ploughing 428 392 358 350 365 349
2 Sowing 360 338 305 298 326 316
3 Weeding 268 302 332 300 280 259
4 Transplanting 232 266 204 174 176 154
5 Harvesting 218 209 222 310 367 369
6 Winnowing 103 110 104 117 147 172
7 Threshing 95 95 92 122 149 188
8 Picking            
  1) Cotton <5 5 13 7 11 16
  2) Jute <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
  3) Tea <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
  4) Others 31 31 25 41 55 56
9 Herdman 149 157 149 153 141 149
10 Well digging 106 98 96 102 100 108
11 Cane Crushing 39 40 36 40 47 58
12 Carpenter 534 521 513 515 517 512
13 Blacksmith 367 365 356 355 356 367
14 Cobbler 230 228 225 226 223 232
15 Mason 533 525 513 519 523 514
16 Tractor Driver 370 376 380 373 356 377
17 Sweeper 65 60 62 65 68 71
18 Unskilled labour 550 542 533 536 540 531
               
  Female            
1 Ploughing 18 14 11 13 16 16
2 Sowing 197 197 178 172 171 178
3 Weeding 227 271 315 284 235 255
4 Transplanting 206 239 188 163 144 158
5 Harvesting 173 164 183 245 311 317
6 Winnowing 66 69 67 76 105 120
7 Threshing 63 57 59 71 93 115
8 Picking            
  1) Cotton <5 5 11 7 10 23
  2) Jute <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
  3) Tea <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
  4) Others 33 27 22 40 71 63
9 Herdman 35 37 37 33 32 31
10 Well digging 23 17 17 22 21 27
11 Cane Crushing 8 9 6 6 11 15
12 Carpenter <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
13 Blacksmith <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
14 Cobbler <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
15 Mason <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
16 Tractor Driver <5 <5 <5 <5 <5 <5
17 Sweeper 39 35 38 36 42 47
18 Unskilled labour 385 390 381 384 383 386
  Total number of schedules submitted 571 563 555 561 568 565

Source: http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/upload/RPC_July_Sep2012.pdf and http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/upload/RPC_Oct_Dec2012.pdf

Monthly data for selected occupations

Yoshifumi Usami has analysed detailed trends of rural wages using WRRI data (\cite{usamiwages2011} and \cite{usamiwages2012}). Usami has very kindly contributed monthly WRRI data for selected occupations that he digitised. Data digitised by him refer to following occupations:

A. Agricultural occupations

  1. Ploughing (male)
  2. Sowing (male)
  3. Transplanting (male and female)
  4. Weeding (female)
  5. Harvesting (male and female)

B. Non-agricultural occupations

  1. Carpenter (male)
  2. Blacksmith (male)
  3. Mason (male)
  4. Unskilled labour (male and female)

Download zipped csv file containing monthly data from here. Data taken from here should be cited as follows:

Usami, Yoshifumi (2014), The NSSO/Labour Bureau Series on Wage Rates in Rural India, 1998-99 to 2012-13, Statistics on Indian Economy and Society, http://www.indianstatistics.org/wrri.html

In comments, entries marked “outlier” are extreme-values that were separately verified from the originals (to ensure that these were not data entry errors). For entries marked “Less than five quotations”, wage data were not reported in the original data because less than five sample schedules provided information for that item.

Figures 1 and 2 show trends of all-India average annual wages for different types of male and female workers using these data.

wrri_wages_male.png

Figure 1: Daily wages of male workers, selected occupations, rural India (Rs., 1986-87 prices)

wrri_wages_female.png

Figure 2: Daily wages of female workers, selected occupations, rural India (Rs., 1986-87 prices)

Footnotes:

1

In these months, among other States, wages were reported for women ploughing workers in schedules from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

2

This is further divided in four sub-samples, for which data are collected in different weeks of the month, to average out week-by-week variations in prices (since data on wages are collected along with data on prices).

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