As per reports, according to the data presented by the retirement fund body Employment Provident Fund Organisation‘s (EPFO) payroll 39.36 lakh new jobs were created in the last 7 months ending March this year.
Latest data revealed that as many as 6.13 lakh new jobs were created in the month of March this year, which is higher than 5.89 lakh payrolls with the EPFO in February this year.
The various sections where job creation was substantially seen across all age brackets were electric, mechanical or general engineering products followed by building and construction industry, trading & commercial establishments and textiles. The states where nearly half of these jobs were created were Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat during the seven-month period till March this year.
Some experts expressed their ambiguity on the data released by EPFO, last month, saying that the estimates may include temporary employees whose contributions may not be continuous for the entire year. However, the EPFO has uploaded the data with disclaimers that the data for most recent months are provisional as updating of employees records is a continuous process and are likely to be updated in subsequent months.
Earlier EPFO had indicated that job creation in the non-farm sector had been the lowest in four months during February 2018. According to tentative estimates released by the retirement fund body, 4,72,075 new members were registered with it in February, compared with 6,04,557 in January. In December 2017, the number of new members with the EPFO stood at 5,57,633, while it got 6,47,019 new registrants in November 2017.
EPFO had been in news earlier when the personal and professional details of about 2.7 crore members registered with the EPFO have been exposed to data theft. In a letter to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Central Provident Fund Commissioner had written that hackers have stolen data from the Aadhaar seeding portal of EPFO. He has also asked the ministry’s technical team to plug vulnerabilities on the portal aadhaar.epfoservices.com that has now been temporarily shut.
The Employment Provident Fund Organisation manages social security funds of workers in the organized/semi-organized sector in India. It has more than 6 crore active members (with an at least one-month contribution during the year).
