Hi Uday, The data appears kosher. This refers to annual average Brent prices calculated by averaging the daily closing price on an FY basis for FY16 and FY17. The said has been sourced from the US Energy Information Association (EIA). I am not sure which type of oil price/calculation method the said source is capturing. Hope the article made for a good read.

Ritika Mankar

Hi Krishna, The Pareto optimal outcome would be, if students' professional choices move in tandem and in proportion to the kind of labour demand that the job market is throwing up. However, information asymmetries in the job market prevent this phenomenon from unfolding. Also, some sectors remain a top priority for students even as these sectors are no longer hiring or paying well! Lets hope that the rise and rise of platforms like LinkedIn and better informed students are able to make superior choices. Thanks again for your thoughtful comments.

Ritika Mankar

Hi Anushtup, Thank you for your very kind comment. The hope is that access to jobs -related data becomes a non-issue over time so that analysts such as myself can spend more time on extracting more insights.

Ritika Mankar

Hi Nupur, In the absence of up-to-date pan-India data across sectors, we analysed all the data we could lay our hands on in the private space. Agriculture and Agro-chemicals for instance is a sector we covered as part of the Sleeping Giants category. SME and MSME hiring is likely to have been covered as part of the sectoral split we looked at. But you make a valid point, a firm-size wise split of hiring activity will be really interesting to see.

Ritika Mankar

Hi Srikanth, This is an insightful and complex question. Let me attempt a simplification to do justice to your point. North India is home to the largest slice of the Indian population. Then the proportion of population that depends on agriculture is unusually high in north India as compared to the rest of India. And then to complicate matters, the per capita income in the Agricultural sector is significantly lower than is the case for the two other sectors of the economy i.e. Industry & Services. So the north to be fair has had a significantly tougher situation to start with. Superior education & skilling efforts along with an active effort to lower ‘the cost’ of doing business is perhaps the only way this situation can be resolved.

Ritika Mankar

Hi Prithvi, Thanks for your comments. You are absolutely right – the country's unemployment will rise meaningfully over the next few quarters. However here are a few points the story above tries to make: (1) Situation was bad, but not uniformly so. Pre-Covid too the job market was in a fragile state. However, all parts were not systematically doing badly. The piece above highlights the few pockets that were holding-up. On the rural front too, it is worth noting that even as headline wage inflation was recorded at multi-year lows; state’s like AP & Haryana experienced an acceleration in wage growth. (2) Things will deteriorate in the short term, but where will India be post-Covid? The last paragraph highlights all the concerns you mention. But as Rohin put it, the idea of the piece is to ‘skate to where the (jobs) puck will be’ and all we have tried is to highlight spots that hold promise! So yes, the job market onion is not in the best of shapes today. But the onion has layers, and peeling these carefully is key.

Ritika Mankar