“In Kolkata, the line between formal and informal work was never a line — it was a spectrum.”
Kolkata Employment & Informal Economy
West Bengal urban workforce trends from PLFS 2017-2024 and Kolkata informal sector composition from e-Shram registrations.
Urban West Bengal's labour force participation rate is 48.2% — but split by gender it is 75.8% for men and 21.5% for women. Female participation has climbed steadily from 17.1% in 2017–18, yet it still sits below the national urban average of 25.2% and more than fifty points behind men.
Beneath the survey numbers sits the informal economy: 2.48 million workers in Kolkata district registered on e-Shram, 792,960 of them in construction and 371,700 in domestic work. Services account for 67.2% of urban employment — a services-dominated city, but not necessarily a formalised one.
About this data
What this page shows
Labour force participation by gender from 2017–18 to 2023–24, unemployment trends, the sectoral composition of employment, e-Shram informal worker registrations by sector and gender, and a comparison of West Bengal urban against India urban. The pandemic is clearly visible: unemployment rose to 9.2% in 2020–21, with female unemployment reaching 14.3%, before recovering to 6.0%.
Where the data comes from
Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) annual reports from MoSPI, and an e-Shram portal snapshot from December 2024.
Limitations worth knowing
PLFS does not publish city-level estimates, so every survey figure here describes West Bengal urban and is used as a proxy for Kolkata. That proxy is imperfect — Kolkata is the state's dominant urban centre but not its only one. India has also not conducted an Economic Census since 2013, which is why no direct enterprise-level data exists to check these figures against. e-Shram registrations are self-declared and driven by benefit eligibility, so they measure who signed up rather than who works informally; the real informal workforce is almost certainly larger. Female labour force participation is further understood to be undercounted across Indian surveys, since unpaid household and family enterprise work is frequently not reported as employment.
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