India's Employment Picture (PLFS 2025 & After)

India's official jobs data show stability at the top line and strain underneath. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Annual Report for calendar 2025, released by MoSPI in March 2026, put the unemployment rate at 3.1% and labour-force participation at 59.3% - both broadly flat on the year. Yet that headline calm sits beside a harder finding from Azim Premji University's State of Working India 2026: roughly two in five graduates under 25 are out of work, and a quarter of all 15-29-year-olds are neither working nor studying. Together the two reports frame India's central labour question - whether a young, better-educated workforce can find enough decent jobs before the demographic window starts to narrow after 2030.