Survey of Members of the Indian Society of Labour Economics on the COVID-19 Crisis and Employment

Beyond the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and mortality, there are major consequences for the labour market. But the information available on this impact is quite fragmented and often anecdotal. Many members of the Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE) have personal experience or knowledge of the impact of the crisis, or have local sources of information and research results, so they constitute an important pool of expertise on the labour market issues concerned. An online survey of ISLE members was therefore carried out in the last week of May 2020 to ask for their assessments of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and their views on the policies needed to overcome it, prior to the ILO-ISLE-IHD virtual conference held on 8–9 June. The questionnaire is given in the supplementary material.1 520 valid responses were received. The first series of questions concerned the views of ISLE members as to the groups which have been most affected by the crisis, in terms of employment and income, in the state of residence of the respondents. Respondents were invited to identify the group of the population most affected within the categories of age, sex, caste, location and migrant status. Figure 1 shows the per cent of respondents choosing each group. The great majority of respondents thought that the middle age groups, aged 30–59, had been most affected. Less than 20% thought that younger people were