Institutional Research
India has the world's largest youth population. How productively they are employed will shape the country's future. We track how much attention India's Parliament gives to employment and livelihoods — and what it focuses on.
How often and how substantively do MPs raise employment issues? Which states and parties are most active?
Where is parliamentary attention lagging? We track focus on gig work, AI-driven displacement, and skills for the future.
What issues unite MPs across party lines? Questions raised by multiple MPs signal shared national concern.
Employment questions as a share of all parliamentary questions, by session
Who's Asking
Cross-Party
When many MPs independently ask about the same issue, it signals concern that cuts across party lines.
Issues
Future of Work
Information
Parliamentary questions are one of the few windows into how individual MPs engage on policy — unlike votes, debates, and most other parliamentary business, questions are not controlled by party whips. This tracker uses that record to show how parliamentary attention to employment and livelihoods is evolving: which issues have cross-party resonance, which states are most engaged, whether the discourse is keeping pace with changes in the nature of work, and whether parliamentary time is being used effectively — for instance, how often MPs ask the government for information that is, or should be, already in the public domain.
We publish breakdowns by party, state, and individual MP so that citizens, researchers, and policymakers can see who is asking, what they are asking about, and what remains unasked. Future editions will track trends across sessions and could be extended to cover Rajya Sabha, state legislatures, and other policy domains beyond employment.
We began tracking parliamentary attention to employment in the 17th Lok Sabha, manually classifying all 60,000+ questions asked between 2019 and 2024. That work built a deep understanding of how employment and livelihoods surface across parliamentary discourse — not just in the obvious ministries, but across agriculture, textiles, fisheries, tribal affairs, and dozens of others.
Building on this, we developed a rigorous classification system for parliamentary questions. All questions addressed to the Ministries of Labour & Employment, Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Youth Affairs & Sports, and Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises are included in full. Questions from all other ministries are screened against 250+ employment-related keywords and 30 government schemes across all their variants.
Each shortlisted question is then assessed for whether it is substantively about employment and livelihoods, not just mentioning these topics in passing. Classification uses large language models, refined through multiple rounds of review, with human judgment applied at every stage. Assessments were reviewed ministry by ministry, and the resulting list was checked again for both false inclusions and false exclusions.
Questions confirmed as relevant were classified across ten dimensions — including policy theme, target group, sector, geographic scope, intent, policy instrument, and government schemes — with over 100 classification codes in total. Each classification required cited evidence from the question text. The final classifications were independently reviewed twice, and those reviews were checked by hand.
Source: Questions and Answers, Lok Sabha, sansad.in. Analysis by Future of India Foundation. This analysis covers all questions through the most recent completed session and will be updated as new sessions conclude.
* One question can have multiple intents, so intent counts may add up to more than the total number of questions.
Session 1 of the 18th Lok Sabha (June 2024) was a brief session with no questions and answers and is therefore not included in this analysis.
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