“In Kolkata, the line between formal and informal work was never a line — it was a spectrum.”
Kolkata Employment
The first official labour-force estimates for Kolkata Municipal Corporation (PLFS, calendar 2025), alongside the West Bengal urban trend from 2017-18 to 2023-24.
In 2025 MoSPI published official labour-force figures for Kolkata itself for the first time. Across the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area, 55.4% of people aged 15 and over are in the labour force: 80.7% of men and 29.5% of women. Women's participation is slightly above the average for India's 46 million-plus cities (27.2%). Three in four workers (75.9%) are in services, and 51.0% hold a regular wage or salaried job.
For earlier years there are no Kolkata figures, only urban West Bengalas a whole. On that measure women's participation rose from 23.0% in 2017-18 to 32.4% in 2023-24, above the all-India urban rate of 28.0%. Unemployment fell from 6.4% to 3.3% over the same period.
About this data
What this page shows
There are three separate blocks, and they are not joined together. (1) Kolkata Municipal Corporation, January–December 2025. This covers labour force participation (LFPR), the worker population ratio (WPR), unemployment, broad sector, type of employment and NEET (young people not in education, employment or training), compared with all million-plus cities and urban India. (2) Urban West Bengal from July 2017–June 2018 to July 2023–June 2024. This covers LFPR, unemployment, women's participation against urban India, and the broad-sector mix. (3) Urban West Bengal for calendar 2025, under MoSPI's redesigned survey.
Where the data comes from
All figures come from MoSPI/NSO publications of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). The 2017-18 to 2023-24 figures are from the PLFS Annual Reports, Appendix A state tables: Tables 16 (LFPR), 17 (WPR), 18 (unemployment) and 27 (industry of work). The 2022-23 report renumbers these as Tables 6, 7, 8 and 16. The 2025 West Bengal and India figures are from the PLFS Annual Report 2025 (January–December 2025). The Kolkata figures are from NSO's Labour Market Dynamics in Million-plus Cities(2026): the Kolkata MC profile and Tables 2, 3, 5, 11, 12 and 13.1. NSO's Labour Market Snapshot of Selected Districts (2026) publishes identical values for Kolkata district. All indicators use usual status (principal plus subsidiary activity, 365-day reference period) for persons aged 15 and above, unless marked as current weekly status.
Limitations worth knowing
Geography: the 2017-18 to 2023-24 series is for urban West Bengal, which includes Howrah, Asansol, Durgapur, Siliguri and every other town in the state. It is not a Kolkata series, and MoSPI published no Kolkata-specific values for those years. Breaks in the series: the 2025 survey uses a revamped sample design and calendar years, and MoSPI says it may not be strictly comparable with the July–June reports. For that reason the 2025 values are shown separately. Sampling error: the Kolkata estimates rest on 1,807 persons in 576 households. The relative standard error of the Kolkata unemployment rate is 29–41%, so that figure is indicative only. LFPR and WPR are much more precise (RSE 2–7%). No COVID spike: usual status looks back over a whole year, so the annual unemployment rate did not jump in 2020-21. The lockdown spike shows up instead in the quarterly current-weekly-status bulletins. Sector definitions: primary means NIC section A only (agriculture, forestry, fishing). Mining is counted in the secondary sector, following PLFS. The West Bengal urban sector shares are computed by summing the published NIC-section shares. Women's work: PLFS counts people whose main activity is unpaid domestic duties as outside the labour force, which lowers the measured female LFPR. Economic Census: the 7th Economic Census was carried out in 2019–21, but its national results have not been published, so there is no recent enterprise-level count to set against these survey figures. e-Shram:no official district-level count of e-Shram registrations for Kolkata is published in a citable form, so this page shows none. The only official figure is the West Bengal state total: 2,64,06,322 registrations as of 19 December 2024 (PIB, Ministry of Labour & Employment). Registration is self-declared and open to ages 16–59 only, so it is not a measure of the informal workforce.
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