Does a rising EPFO count really amount to more good jobs?
· Scroll
The Indian government claims that the formal job market in the country is booming. It cites as proof the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) payroll data.
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EPF is a mandatory government-backed retirement savings scheme in India for salaried workers. The question, however, is: does a rising EPFO count really amount to more good jobs?
The official story goes as follows. The Economic Survey 2023–24 reported that net EPFO payroll additions more than doubled, from 6.11 million in FY2018-19 to 13.15 million, and called it “healthy growth in formal employment”. The Union Labour Ministry hailed it promptly as a “growing formal employment landscape.”
The government has now gone further and linked formalisation of employment directly to “quality jobs”. In August 2026, it promoted the PM Viksit Bharat Rozgar Yojana as a scheme to expand formal employment, designed to encourage first-time employment and to reward employers for creating new formal jobs through EPFO.
Formalisation is valuable. A worker brought under EPF coverage gains access to an institutional mechanism for retirement savings and social security. An enterprise complying with labour regulations represents progress over one that does not.
However, these claims ignore reality. An EPFO “net subscriber addition” is not a net new job. It can include a person moving from one EPFO-covered employer to another; an existing worker...