The release of district-level data from the National Statistics Office’s Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises has added geographic detail to a large but uneven part of India’s economy. The 2025 survey estimates that 79 million informal sector establishments outside agriculture and construction employed 128 million workers and generated ₹19,92,577 crore in nominal gross value added. Yet the distribution of those establishments, workers and economic output is highly concentrated.
The numbers point to an important distinction in how India’s urban and regional economies function. It takes 130 of roughly 770 districts to account for half of the country’s informal sector establishments. Half of the sector’s workers are concentrated in 121 districts, while just 95 districts account for half of its gross value added. The pattern suggests that the informal economy is geographically broad but economically uneven: many districts host large numbers of enterprises, while a smaller group generates a disproportionate share of output.
That distinction matters for understanding cities and their surrounding districts. The districts with the largest numbers of informal establishments are not limited to India’s million-plus cities. North 24 Parganas, Delhi, South 24 Parganas, Kolkata and Surat record the highest establishment counts in the report. North and South 24 Parganas are neighbouring districts of Kolkata, showing how the economic geography of a metropolitan region can extend beyond the core city and its formal administrative boundaries.
According to the report, the five districts have 1.66 million, 1.03 million, 1.03 million, 884,000 and 851,000 establishments respectively. The ordering follows the sequence of North 24 Parganas, Delhi, South 24 Parganas, Kolkata and Surat. These figures describe the scale of enterprise activity, but they do not by themselves measure productivity, wages or the quality of employment. Those indicators produce a different map.
The districts with the most workers are broadly similar but appear in another order: Delhi, North 24 Parganas, Surat, Ranga Reddy and Kolkata. Their estimated informal sector workforces are 2.2 million, 2.1 million, 1.7 million, 1.7 million and 1.4 million respectively. Ranga Reddy, a district neighbouring Hyderabad in Telangana, appears among the leading districts for workers even though it is not identified in the supplied material as a million-plus city.
The gap between establishment counts and worker counts is significant. A district can have many enterprises without having the largest workforce, and a district with a large workforce does not necessarily generate the highest gross value added. This makes the informal sector difficult to understand through a single measure of concentration. Enterprise density, employment scale and output are related, but they are not interchangeable indicators of urban economic strength.
The output figures reinforce that point. Delhi, Ranga Reddy, Surat, Pune and Mumbai Suburban are the five districts with the highest estimated gross value added from the sector. Their contributions are ₹55,289 crore, ₹45,983 crore, ₹37,399 crore, ₹28,709 crore and ₹27,357 crore respectively. North 24 Parganas, which ranks first for the number of establishments, falls to sixth place for gross value added.
This divergence is one of the clearest findings in the district-level data. A large number of establishments may reflect the spread of small and low-output businesses, while higher gross value added may be associated with a different combination of enterprise scale, sectoral composition, market access and workforce concentration. The supplied report does not establish which of these factors explains the differences. It does, however, show that the geography of informal businesses is not the same as the geography of informal economic output.
The national scale of the sector adds another layer to the picture. The 79 million establishments recorded in 2025 account for 128 million workers, or 36% of all non-agricultural workers, according to the survey figures reported by Hindustan Times. At the same time, the sector generates 8% of India’s total nominal non-agricultural gross value added. The comparison places a large employment base alongside a smaller share of measured economic output.
That relationship should not be reduced to a conclusion about the worth of informal work. The figures indicate an economy that absorbs a substantial share of non-agricultural workers but contributes a smaller share of non-agricultural output. The data supplied does not explain whether this reflects low productivity, differences in the types of activity covered, limited capital, enterprise size, working conditions or other structural factors. It establishes the scale and imbalance, not a single cause.
The district-level report also provides a separate measure of employment quality by recording emoluments per hired worker. Only around 13% of the establishments covered hire workers, according to the report. The highest annual emoluments per hired worker are recorded in Dehradun, Dakshina Kannada, Ajmer, Indore and Kannur. The reported values range from ₹4.6 lakh in Dehradun to ₹2.5 lakh in Kannur.
This ranking does not match the districts with the largest establishment counts, workforces or gross value added. Dehradun, Dakshina Kannada, Ajmer and Kannur are not among the million-plus cities for which the NSO published an earlier report, according to the supplied material. Their appearance in the emoluments ranking shows why the informal economy cannot be assessed only through the largest metropolitan centres. Smaller or non-metropolitan districts can perform differently on worker remuneration even when they do not lead on enterprise numbers or total output.
The report also places clear limits on how precisely these district comparisons can be interpreted. The NSO published data for 757 of 770 districts in the sampling frame. Hindustan Times increased the coverage to 760 by adding Union Territory-level data for Delhi, Chandigarh and Lakshadweep. However, most district estimates have large error margins.
For the number of establishments, the error margin is within 10% of the estimate for only 78 districts and within 20% for 495 districts. For the number of workers, the corresponding figures are 48 districts within 10% and 435 districts within 20%. The uncertainty is even more pronounced for some remuneration estimates: the error margin is reported at 54% in Dehradun and 30% in Kannur.
These margins do not make the survey unusable. They do mean that close rankings should not be treated as definitive. A district reported slightly above another may not be meaningfully different once sampling uncertainty is considered. The broader patterns—concentration in a limited number of districts, the separation between enterprise numbers and gross value added, and the large national employment base—are more useful than treating every position in a ranking as exact.
The institutional importance of the data lies in this combination of scale and variation. A national total can show how many establishments and workers are present, but it cannot show where administrative systems encounter the greatest concentration of informal activity. District-level estimates provide a more detailed basis for seeing the relationship between metropolitan cores, adjoining districts and non-metropolitan centres. The report’s appearance of North and South 24 Parganas, Ranga Reddy and other districts outside the million-plus city list is especially relevant to that question.
At the same time, the supplied material does not identify a specific government programme, funding mechanism or district-level policy response linked to the findings. It therefore cannot establish whether planning, labour administration, infrastructure provision or economic policy is being adjusted in response to the survey. What the evidence does establish is that informal economic activity is distributed across administrative geographies that do not align neatly with the country’s largest cities.
That matters for the built environment because enterprise activity and employment are not confined to formal commercial districts or municipal cores. The data identifies large concentrations in Delhi, Kolkata and Surat, but also in districts adjacent to those cities. It shows that urban economic systems operate through wider regional networks, while the survey’s separate rankings suggest that employment and output may be distributed differently within those networks. The evidence does not provide information about land use, infrastructure access or working conditions, so those links remain outside what can be concluded here.
The larger urban question is how India should read an economy that is simultaneously widespread, employment-intensive and uneven in output. The district data provides no single answer, but it challenges a city-only view of informality. The most populous informal economies, the largest workforces, the highest output and the highest reported emoluments appear in different places.
The evidence confirms that a relatively small group of districts accounts for a large share of India’s informal establishments, workers and gross value added. It also confirms that district rankings need to be read alongside sampling uncertainty, particularly when differences are narrow or based on estimates with large error margins. The next useful developments will be closer examination of the district-level tables and any official or institutional response to the geographic concentration revealed by the 2025 ASUSE report.
