Earlier, August (9.4 per cent) and September (6.1 per cent) had also seen a month-on-month decline in the number of new subscribers.

New Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) subscriptions in October plunged to 727,899 from 982,526 in September. This is the lowest monthly enrollment under the social security organisation since May 2021, when only 649,618 new subscribers were added.

Surprisingly, enrolment of new male subscribers fell faster, by 26.1 per cent, than their female counterparts (25.5 per cent) in October.

According to data released by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), which conducts its own survey, India fared poorly on jobs in October, with the unemployment rate (UR) rising to 7.8 per cent in October from 6.4 per cent in September, due to a massive 8.04 per cent spike in rural joblessness.

“The fall in employment in October was essentially in non-agricultural rural India with rural services sectors losing 4.6 million jobs out of the total 7.9 million services jobs lost in October 2022,” CMIE said in a statement.

Of the new EPF subscribers added in October, 416,733 are in the 18-25 age group, down 24 per cent from 548,567 subscribers in September. This is crucial as subscribers in the 18-25 age group are usually first-timers in the labour market, and a reflection of its robustness.

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder, TeamLease Services says the sharp decline in employment in October is due to rationalisation of human resources by firms, following the culmination of the long festive demand in October.

“Going forward, firms are unlikely to retain a large workforce for the remainder of the fiscal year. It is only in the next fiscal that they might again see an increase in their workforce,” she added.

Besides, net payroll addition, which is calculated taking into account the number of new hires, number of exits, and return of old subscribers, was also down by 12.7 per cent from 1,482,497 in September to 1,293,606 in October.

The net monthly payroll numbers are provisional in nature and often revised sharply the following month. That is why the new EPF subscriber figure is accepted with more trust than net additions.

However, the number of subscribers that exited the EPF scheme in October declined sharply to 358,093 from 690,372 in September.

The monthly data release is part of the government’s effort to track formal sector employment in the country by using payrolls as an instrument.

Since April 2018, the National Statistical Office has been bringing out employment-related statistics in the formal sector, covering the period September 2017 onwards, using information on the number of subscribers under three major schemes, namely the Employees’ Provident Fund Scheme, Employees’ State Insurance Scheme (ESIC), and the National Pension System (NPS). The monthly ESIC and NPS data for September will be released shortly.