The unemployment rate in India jumped to 29% since the country went into lockdown from March 2020, says the report of CMIE – Centre For Monitoring Indian Economy. The lockdown to contain the coronavirus outbreak has forced many industries to shut down thus increasing unemployment across the country. Unemployment situation when a person actively searches for a job and is unable to find work. Unemployment tells the health of the economy. 

The unemployment rate is the most frequent measure of unemployment. The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed divided by the working population or people working under labour force.

Unemployment rate = (Unemployed Workers / Total labour force) × 100

National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) defines employment and unemployment on the following activity statuses of an individual, NSSO, an organization under MoSPI – Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation measures India’s unemployment on three approaches:

1. Daily Status Approach: unemployment status of a person under this approach is measured for each day in a reference week. A person having no gainful work even for one hour in a day is described as unemployed for that day.
2. Weekly Status Approach: This approach highlights the record of those persons who did not have gainful work or were unemployed even for an hour on any day of the week preceding the date of the survey.
3. Usual Status Approach: This gives the estimates of those persons who were unemployed or had no gainful work for a major time during the 365 days.

In India, there are seven types of unemployment. The types of unemployment are discussed below:

1. Disguised Unemployment: This is a type of unemployment where people employed are more than actually needed. Disguised unemployment is generally traced in unorganised sectors or agricultural sector of India.
2. Structural Unemployment: This unemployment arises when there is a mismatch between the worker’s skills and availability of jobs in the market. Many people in India do not get job matching to their skills or due to lack of required skills they do not get jobs and because of poor education level, it becomes to provide them related training. 
3. Seasonal Unemployment: That situation of unemployment when people do not have during certain seasons of the year such as labourers in India rarely have work throughout the year.
4. Vulnerable Employment: people are deemed unemployed under this unemployment. People are employed but informally i.e. without proper job contracts and thus records of their work are never maintained. It is one of the main types of unemployment in India.
5. Technological Unemployment: the situation when people lose their jobs due to advancement in technologies. In 2016, the data of the World Bank predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened by automation in India is 69% year-on-year.
6. Cyclical Unemployment: unemployment caused due to the business cycle, where the number of unemployed heads rises during recessions and declines with the growth of the economy. Cyclical unemployment figures in India are negligible. 
7. Frictional Unemployment: this is a situation when people are unemployed for a short span of time while searching for a new job or switching between the jobs. The Frictional Unemployment also called Search Unemployment, it is the time lag between the jobs. Frictional unemployment is considered as voluntary unemployment because the reason for unemployment is not a shortage of jobs, but in fact, the workers themselves quit their jobs in search of better opportunities.

The major causes of unemployment in India are as mentioned below:

• Large population.
• Lack of vocational skills or low educational levels of the working population.
• Labour-intensive sectors suffering from the slowdown in private investment particularly after demonetisation
• The low productivity in the agriculture sector plus the lack of alternative opportunities for agricultural workers that makes transition among the three sectors difficult.
• legal complexities, Inadequate state support, low infrastructural, financial and market linkages to small businesses making such enterprises unviable with cost and compliance overruns.
• Inadequate growth of infrastructure and low investments in the manufacturing sector, hence restricting the employment potential of the secondary sector.
• The huge workforce of the country is associated with the informal sector because of a lack of required education or skills, and this data is not captured in employment statistics.
• The main cause of structural unemployment is the education provided in schools and colleges are not as per the current requirements of the industries. 
• Regressive social norms that deter women from taking/continuing employment.