India, Aug. 11 -- The government released labour market data for the quarter ending April-June 2026 on Monday. This is the first pan-India quarterly edition of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), which lends itself to an annual comparison. Quarterly bulletins of the PLFS before the April-June 2025 period only covered urban markets. The most important takeaway from the data is that India's unemployment rate remained flat at 5.4% in a quarter otherwise scarred by a large oil shock on account of the ongoing war in West Asia. What does one make of it?

One way to describe this is to say that the Indian economy managed to avoid any large disruption due to the war. Anecdotally and even statistically, there is nothing wrong with such an arg...