Rural Non-Agricultural Employment

Employment Tara Shukla A NATIONAL Seminar on Non-Agricultural Employment in India: Trends and Prospects, jointly sponsored by the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics and Gujarat Institute of Area Planning took place at Ahmedabad, between March 29 and 31, 1989. The seminar was unique in the sense that it brought together agricultural economists, urban economists, demo graphers, planners and policy-makers, making the dialogue inter-disciplinary. Any macro level study on employment in rural sector is necessarily confronted by two data sets, one provided by the decennial population censuses and the other quinquennial surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation. The former is plagued with frequent definitional changes, albeit with a view to improving quality of data, rendering comparison over time a little difficult. The other, though confined to the period 1973 to 1983, has an advantage of getting hooked up to the 1961 population census data on account of similarity in the concepts used. The latter source is decidedK more refined, conceptually uniform and touches upon various aspects not covered by the population census but disaggregated data are not available beyond the regional level as defined by it.