New Delhi, May 16 -- India's unemployment rate stood at 5.1% in April, the National Statistics Office (NSO) said on Thursday in its first ever monthly data on labour market indicators. Monthly employment numbers, before the NSO released them yesterday, were only available from private sources like the Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy (CMIE). Compared to the 5.1% overall unemployment rate, rural and urban India had rates at 4.5% and 6.5% respectively. The other two key labour metrics, LFPR and WPR were 42% and 39.8% respectively. LFPR is the share of population working or looking for a job and WPR represents the employed. LFPR was 42.9% for rural areas and 39.9% for urban areas. WPR was 41% in rural areas and 37.3% for urban areas. Since these numbers are the first ever monthly employment estimates, they cannot show a trend yet. To be sure, the April numbers for urban unemployment rate are lower than the quarterly urban unemployment rate for the April-June quarter in all seven financial years up to 2024-25 for which this data is available. After a sharp uptick in 2020-21, urban unemployment rate fell in all quarters compared to earlier years. However, this was accompanied with a qualitative deterioration in jobs, a trend that appeared to reverse only last year. No data on quality of jobs was published in the monthly bulletin for April. The NSO could publish monthly estimates as it changed the sampling design of the Periodic PLFS, India's official labour market survey since 2017-18, in January this year. The change increased the annual sample size to around 272,000 households, 2.65 times the sample size up to December 2024. This provides a sample of around 89,000 households in the monthly estimates and representation of most districts, the NSO said in a report published a day before the April bulletin was released. The urban sample size for the April data was 40,111 households, similar to the sample size of 45,074 households used for generating the October-December urban bulletin. Another important change in the survey is that quarterly estimates will now be available for both rural and urban areas....