28-11-2025

Data Analytics, Data Analytics and AI

India’s 2015 National Classification of Occupations Data File

One of the outputs from a project I worked on in 2025 was a data file of India’s 2015 National Classification of Occupations. The

Intro

One of the projects I worked on this year was analyzing India’s labour market to identify potential occupational transition pathways. There’s quite a bit more that I could say about this work as it was both interesting and required getting my hands dirty with labour force modelling, but if you’re interested Daniel Raimi and Jacob Greenspon have a great paper on the topic called Finding the Right Fit: What Jobs Offer a Good Match for Fossil Fuel Workers’ Skills? (available here). There’s also a great dashboard based on their work here.

Because this work required digging into India’s labour force statistics and occupational classifications, one of the outputs of this work was India’s 2015 National Classification of Occupations (NCO) in a csv format, which you can download below. A couple of things to note:

  • The final data table is a result of manual data entry by my team and parsing by large language models (LLMs), but translating the PDFs into a data table isn’t a simple task, so there’s sure to be errors.
  • You’re free to use this data file (which is why I’m sharing it), just make sure to carefully check its accuracy and let me know if you’ve used it so I can point others to better versions of the data.
  • Feel free to reach out if you spot any errors and I’ll update the post so others are aware.

The source for the data were these PDFs from India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment. You can download the 2025 version of the occupation data table here (see note below).

Update: Dr Wadhwa and Ayesha Ahmed from Ashoka University got in touch to share a set of correspondences her team had developed to link India’s 2003 and 2015 NCO at the 3 digit level (see here).

They also shared revised versions of tables I’d used to create the 2025 occupation data table above. I haven’t updated the 2025 table to reflect their changes, so users of either file should crosscheck each for omissions, inaccuracies and/or inconsistencies before use.  

You can download their revised data tables here:

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