About 1.70 lakh jobs were created in Tamil Nadu’s formal sector in February 2022, according to provisional data provided by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). This is an increase of 26% from January 2022 and 13% from February 2021, respectively.
The new jobs added are measured in terms of the number of new net enrolments made with the EPFO.
Aditya Mishra, chief executive of recruitment firm CIEL HR Services, pointed out that Tamil Nadu had done well in picking up the pace of employment creation (26% over the previous month) vis-à-vis the national average of 2% growth. “The manufacturing industry, electronic manufacturing and the services sector have created new jobs at a pace much higher than that of other segments,” he said.
Among the various categories, the ‘over 35 years’ age group saw an addition of 35,378 jobs in February 2022, up 33% from 26,688 in January 2022. The age group of 22-25 saw an addition of 45,081 jobs in February 2022, up 29% from 35,017 jobs in January 2022.
A pan-India comparison of payroll figures highlights that the establishments covered in the States of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Haryana and Delhi are in the lead, by adding about 9.52 lakh net subscribers during February 2022, which is around 67.49% of the total net payroll addition across all age groups, the EPFO said.
Vidya Mahambare, Professor of Economics, Great Lakes Institute of Management, said the higher numbers could partly be due to people moving from one company to another in sectors such as Information Technology/Information Technology-Enabled Services and others. “New employers start a new account rather than using the existing account. The shifting of jobs and companies has been increasing in recent months,” she added.
IT majors TCS and Infosys reported overall attrition levels of 17.4% and 27.7%, respectively, in the quarter ending March 31, while HCL Technologies posted 21.9%.
As per the Union government, payroll data is provisional. This is because data generation is a continuous exercise as updation of employee records is a continuous process and, hence, previous data gets updated every month.
