Introducing the Labour Market Information System-India

Imagine a welder in Nagpur who hears that factories in Pune pay more. Is it worth moving? Will the pay there cover the cost of living? Or think of a job seeker in Sirsa, who wants to go for skills training, but doesn’t know what skills employers want, and which are the jobs that pay.

Without timely and accurate information, such decisions are made in the dark and lead to labour market inefficiencies. Discouraged job seekers may stop looking for jobs. Workers can lose out on getting the best possible wages if they don’t know what their skills are worth. Employers with the best intentions may fail to comply with wage regulations.

Countries such as South Korea, Australia, Germany and the UK already have such systems to collect, store, analyse, and share insights on the labour market in a timely manner. India has nothing comparable.

WageIndicator’s Labour Market Information System-India (LMIS) aims to plug these information gaps. The LMIS dashboard prototype will be launched on 1 December 2026 at the 2nd International Conference: Work, Wages, and Workforce, hosted by FLAME University in Pune. You can register by sending an email to this address.

What the dashboard will show

The LMIS analyses job postings to bring out unique insights about India’s labour market. Updated every quarter, it will show:

• Hiring trends across Indian districts
• Pay ranges for the same occupation across districts
• Skills each occupation needs, and what a job could pay
• Gender pay gap
• Changes in labour demand across industries
• Minimum wages, advertised wages, and living wages

These insights help workers make informed decisions about their careers. For example, they can assess what skills are necessary for a particular job and whether the job pays enough to cover the cost of acquiring the skill. Similarly, a person considering taking up a new job in another district can gauge whether the pay actually matches the cost of living estimates.

Apart from workers, the dashboard’s insights on job posting, job search and job matching can help researchers and policy experts in providing the best support for jobseekers in their career lifecycle.

The LMIS provides insights on emerging occupations, in-demand skills across locations and data on making it valuable for workers to plan their career paths,” said Prof Rupa Korde, assistant professor at FLAME University, an implementation partner for the LMIS. “It is also a highly useful data repository that will help our labour market research.”

How it works

The LMIS dashboard brings together data from household surveys such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey and online job postings.

In the first year, the LMIS has data from over 400,000 job vacancies across India. This real-time data helps capture the changing nature of the job market.

It is layered with data from PLFS 2025 that covered 270,472 households and 1.1 million individuals. Unlike job postings, which are not representative of a specific geographic region, industry, or occupation, PLFS is representative at the district level. Thus, it complements job postings by bringing out district-level estimates on industries, occupations, hours worked, and wages. Combining the two allows stakeholders to assess the labour market dynamics each quarter.

The data will also be used to compute how exposed India’s economy is to artificial intelligence (AI). It will compute occupation-specific AI exposure following the methodology developed by Felten, Raj and Seamans (2021) and Pizzinelli et al. (2023).

The implementation partners are the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, FLAME University, Pune and WageIndicator Foundation. The partners have engaged with each other over two decades to enhance labour market transparency in India.

A multi-stakeholder Advisory Committee of researchers, social partners and industry representatives supports the work. Job Portals MyJobee and HamaraJobs (Quess) are data partners who are also helping with the design of the LMIS. Don Bosco Tech Society and Generation India Foundation, as knowledge partners, have supported in developing the use case for skilling institutes and job seekers.

What’s next

LMIS-India has been developed as a public good. A public good that shows labour market insights is useful only when it is used and benefits the labour market actors.

"Once the system is tested and its results validated, LMIS could become an important tool for the economy," said Prof Biju Varkkey of IIMA. "Both jobseekers and providers stand to benefit from a robust LMIS. The method and system should work for any industry or occupation and can be adopted across countries.”

“There is scope to build on it”, he added.

For example, state governments could add state-specific insights, and technology could be added to support career counselling. The analysis could also be extended by policy experts and other institutions working towards a productive workforce in India.

Want to collaborate with us, do research, or fund the LMIS? Write to Leena Bhattacharya at leena.bhattacharya@wageindicator.org