By Purna Chandra Jena
As Uttarakhand pursues its Udyamita Rajya ambitions, PLFS figures show a hill economy in transition — but the latest, calendar-year-round data complicates the good-news story more than it confirms it.
Since 2017-18, the Periodic Labour Force Survey has been the most credible mirror a state has for its labour market. For Uttarakhand — long dependent on tourism, hydropower, and the Haridwar-Udham Singh Nagar industrial belt, with heavy out-migration from hill districts — the mirror has shown rapid change. The Worker Population Ratio (WPR) for persons 15 and above rose from 41.4% in 2018-19 to 58.1% in 2023-24, a 17-point gain, according to the Labour Ministry’s Lok Sabha reply and the state’s own reading of PLFS 2023-24. Unemployment eased from 4.5% to 4.3% over the same two years, and youth unemployment fell sharply, from 14.2% to 9.8%. The Dhami government reads this as validation of its Udyamita Rajya push — the state’s Startup and MSME policies and the skilling pipeline under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana — aimed squarely at the youth cohort, where the gains were concentrated.
Broad trends: The WPR climb was uneven — from 41.4% (2018-19) to 49.5% (2019-20, partly due to reverse migration during Covid), a plateau at 48.7% through 2020-21 and 2021-22 as tourism absorbed successive Covid waves, then acceleration to 53.5% (2022-23) and 58.1% (2023-24), with youth WPR (15-29) nearly doubling, from 27.5% to 44.2%, in the final year alone. UR at 4.3% stayed above the national average of roughly 3.2%, a gap NITI Aayog notes has persisted since 2017-18, but the pace of youth UR improvement outpaced the national trend.
Fig. 1: Uttarakhand’s WPR (bars) climbed sharply through 2023-24; the calendar-year PLFS 2025 round (grey bar) breaks strict comparability but shows UR (green line) rising to 5.1%.
Participation, not just jobs: LFPR (15+) rose from 56% (2022-23) to 60.7% (2023-24), above the national 60.1%; youth LFPR rose from 43.7% to 49%, ahead of the national 46.5%. A rise in participation alongside falling unemployment is the more reassuring combination — a WPR driven by discouraged workers re-entering precarious self-employment would not typically coincide with falling youth UR in the same year.
Female workforce and sectoral mix: NITI Aayog’s state summary shows that Uttarakhand’s Female LFPR was converging towards the national average by 2022-23, notable in a state where hill women shoulder a large unpaid-work burden that PLFS undercounts. Sectorally, the same reading placed the workforce in Agriculture (47.4%), Services (31.4%), and Construction-plus-Manufacturing (20.3%) — lopsided for a state whose Industry sector generates 48.6% of GSVA, with manufacturing alone accounting for 36% of that, pointing to a capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive industrial belt around Haridwar, Rudrapur and Kashipur.
The hill-versus-plains divide: State aggregates obscure a fault line every Uttarakhand policymaker knows: Haridwar and Udham Singh Nagar account for most industrial and service jobs, while the state’s eleven hill districts continue to lose their working-age population, even as their PLFS-recorded WPR looks respectable — often inflated by subsistence agriculture and MGNREGA work counted as employment. District-level PLFS tables, promised under the January 2025 redesign, would settle whether hill joblessness is actually improving or whether the state aggregate is being carried by three plains districts alone.
What the newest round actually shows: That redesign has already taken effect. From January 2025, PLFS shifted to a calendar-year cycle, nearly tripled its sample to about 2.72 lakh households, and made the district the sampling stratum. The first Annual Report under the new design, PLFS 2025, was released in March 2026 — and its Uttarakhand numbers complicate, rather than confirm, the good-news run. On the new calendar-year basis, Uttarakhand’s LFPR (15+) is 56.3%, WPR 53.4%, and UR 5.1% — all weaker than the 2023-24 figures above, and UR now well above the national 3.1%. Youth UR (15-29) is 13.9%, close to the earlier 14.2% low point rather than the 9.8% the state had reached. MoSPI is explicit that the redesign breaks strict comparability with the July-June series, so this is not proof that the earlier gains reversed — but it is a caution against reading 58.1% WPR as the settled state of play. One thing the new round does confirm: job quality has improved structurally. Regular wage or salaried work is 29.3% of employment, against 23.6% nationally, and casual labour just 13.2%, against 20.2% nationally — Uttarakhand’s workforce, when employed, holds meaningfully better jobs than the national average, even if fewer people are currently finding that work..
A gap the numbers still miss: Neither PLFS round separately identifies gig and platform workers — a Dehradun delivery rider or an app-booked homestay host is grouped under “self-employed” or “casual labour”, the same categories used for a farm hand. NITI Aayog estimates India’s gig workforce at 12 million in FY25, heading towards 23.5 million by 2029-30; MoSPI has signalled a future gig classification but has not added one. Because labour sits on the Concurrent List (Entries 22-24, Seventh Schedule), five states — Rajasthan, Karnataka, Bihar, Jharkhand and Telangana — have already legislated their own gig-worker welfare boards and platform levies, ahead of the Centre’s Code on Social Security, 2020, which takes effect only from November 2025. Uttarakhand has no equivalent yet, despite a workforce increasingly mixing tourism-season gig work with plains-based delivery and ride-hailing.
The road ahead: A WPR that rose by 17 points over five years and youth unemployment that nearly halved in a single year constitute a genuinely creditable record. But the latest PLFS round is a reminder that a state built on tourism and hydropower will experience volatile year-to-year swings, and that a hill-plains gap can hide within a respectable state average. Homestay tourism, herbal and organic horticulture clusters, and the Haridwar-Udham Singh Nagar industrial package will only be judged fairly once district-level PLFS tables show whether the gains reach Pithoragarh and Uttarkashi as much as Haridwar. The next two or three calendar-year PLFS rounds, read at district level once released, remain the fairest test.
(The writer is an Economic Advisor, Advisory Support Group, Chief Minister’s Office, Government of Uttarakhand, and a consultant at CHIEF Policy Strategy Advisors, New Delhi. Views are personal.)
