In other words, much of the subsidiary economic activity for rural males tends to be some form of agricultural activity rather than non-agricultural work. It is also worth noting that the current weekly status, which gives a flow measure  of labour rather than a stock measure, provides much lower estimates of activity for agriculture in particular.
 
For rural women, the picture is quite different. To begin with, Chart 10 shows that the 55^th Round stands out in terms of a very sharp drop in the share of agriculture, which is completely counter to the earlier rising trend evidenced from all the earlier Surveys of the 1990s. In fact, according to Principal and Subsidiary Status together, the drop in the share of agricultural work is around 12 percentage points, from 37.6 to 25.5 per cent just between 1998 and 1999-2000, which appears rather implausible.
Chart 10 >>
 
This decline is even sharper if the Principal status alone is considered, which fell by nearly 20 percentage points between the two Surveys which were very close together in time. Meanwhile, however, the weekly measure shows an increase in the share of agricultural work. All this clearly deserves more investigation.
 
The point is that such a dramatic decline does not appear to have been compensated for by a commensurate increase in non-agricultural employment for rural females. It is true that the 55^th Round does indicate an increase in this share by all the indicators, but this still accounts in total for a very small share of less than 5 per cent of the total female population.
 
For both males and females, the overall decline in work participation which is reflected by these figures should be explained by either education or unemployment, or a combination of the two.  As Chart 9 show, the proportion of males in education has indeed increased, but this increase is not as substantial as the fall in aggregate employment rates would lead us to expect. In fact the 55^th Round shows very little difference from the earlier Rounds in this respect, merely conforming to the generally upward trend but with no sharp additional increase.
Chart 9 >>
  
Similarly Chart 13 which shows the same data for rural females again shows that there is a continuation of the earlier upward trend in terms of participation in education, but the increase is not large enough to explain away the fall in aggregate employment rate (as per cent of population). It is also worth noting that for both males and females, the current weekly status shows a lower degree of participation in education than the usual status definitions, indicating that even when there may be formal registration in education, actual attendance is probably less. (The current daily status shows an even lower rate.)
Chart 13 >> 
 
So then what are the trends in unemployment ? Chart 8 plots the male unemployment rates as proportion of rural male population, while Chart 12 does the same for females. It is interesting to find that the usual status definitions actually suggest that unemployment rates fell in the 5^th Round compared to the immediately preceding Round, although they remain higher than for the previous large sample survey. For women the unemployment rate even by usual status increased over previous Rounds.
Chart 8 >> Chart 12 >>
 
But even more striking than that is the strong divergence that the latest Round suggests between usual status and current weekly status definitions of unemployment. It should be noted that even the current weekly status definition of unemployment is a fairly restrictive one, which excludes large numbers of people who are effectively unemployed. Thus, the NSS reports a person as working if he or she had worked (i.e. pursued any economic activity) for at least one hour on at least one day during the 7 days preceding the date of survey.
 
Even by this very restrictive definition, the 55^th Round results suggest that the proportion of male population who had not found any work for even an hour in the previous week had doubled to more than 2 per cent (amounting to a much higher share of the labour force) in just the period since the previous survey. For women too, the  unemployment rate by weekly status definition shows a sharp increase.
 
More to the point, since the decline in work participation rates cannot be fully explained by either education or unemployment, it seems that there must be other factors which are affecting the rates. In developed countries, much is made of the "discouraged worker effect", which means that those who find it difficult to get jobs often withdraw from the labour force. This is likely to have much less relevance in the Indian rural economy context where informal and self-employment figure much more prominently, where social security systems are lacking and where the luxury of open unemployment is simply not available to most of the poor population.
 
In this context, the facts of decelerating employment growth, increased unemployment rates and declining work participation rates which cannot be explained completely by greater participation in education, point to a very serious crisis of employment generation in rural India. The aggregate picture, therefore, is one that must lead to pressure for reorienting the macroeconomic strategy towards the basic goal of increasing productive employment opportunity.