Mumbai, September 17: Amid the coronavirus lockdown imposed by the Union government since March 2020, an estimated 6.6. million white-collar professionals lost their jobs between May and August, says the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. The CMIE estimated that this had brought down the employment to the lowest level since 2016.

According to the CMIE weekly analysis, the biggest loss of jobs was reported among the salaried employees who belong to the white-collar professionals including software engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, analysts and the type. All these people are professionally qualified and employed in some private or public organisation. Self-employed professionals were, however, not included in the list. Rahul Gandhi Tweets 'Modi Govt's Well-Planned Fight Against COVID-19 Has Put India in Abyss of Historic GDP Reduction And Job Loss'.

Listing out the findings, CMIE said, as quoted by Economic Times, "From a peak of 18.8 million white-collar workers employed in the country during May-August 2019, their employment fell down to 12.2 million in the May-August 2020. This is the lowest employment of these professionals since 2016." It added that all the gains made by firms over the past four years were washed away during the lockdown.

Adding more, CMIE said, "By a similar year-on-year comparison, they lost five million employees. This translates into a 26% fall in employment among industrial workers over a year. However, the decline in employment of industrial workers is likely to be largely in the smaller industrial units. This reflects the distress in the medium, small and micro industrial units in recent times."

It is to be known that CMIE had previously estimated that around 121 million jobs were lost in April but most of it recovered by August. The CMIE's analysis is based on the data from the 20th wave of CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey released every four months.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 17, 2020 06:20 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).