10 districts with largest non-farm informal firms are in WB, Gujarat, Telangana, UP

North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal has the highest number of unincorporated non-agricultural enterprises and employed the largest number of workers in such firms, and Mahe district in Puducherry has the highest gross value added per enterprise.

These are some of the findings from a latest report by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation on the informal non-farm sector.

“The unincorporated non-agricultural sector exhibits a notable concentration of economic activity across districts,” said the report Unincorporated Sector at the District Level: Insights from ASUSE 2025. The top 10 districts are spread across four states -- Gujarat, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, while the top 50 districts are spread across twelve states -- Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

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It further revealed that the Top 10 districts, ranked by the estimated number of unincorporated establishments, together account for about one-tenth of the total establishments, workers and Gross Value Added (GVA) generated by the sector while the top 50 districts capture nearly one-third of the total establishments, workforce and GVA.

Roughly one-third of all districts have more than 100,000 unincorporated establishments per district, while about 9% of the districts have fewer than 10,000 establishments per district. Only 16 districts (eight from West Bengal, three from Maharashtra, two from Gujarat, one each from Karnataka, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh) have more than 500,000 unincorporated establishments per district.

The findings are for the survey period January to December 2025. District-level estimates for Delhi could not be generated and are not part of the report.

Amongst states, several districts in West Bengal reported the largest number of unincorporated non-agricultural enterprises. While North 24 Parganas district reported 16.59 lakh establishments with 21.3 lakh workers, South 24 Parganas had 10.29 lakh such firms and 12.4 lakh workers employed. However, the GVA per establishment was low at just Rs 1.59 lakh and Rs 1.62 lakh respectively.

Meanwhile, Surat in Gujarat had 8.51 lakh such firms with 17.4 lakh workers employed and GVA per establishment of Rs 4.39 lakh.

But the highest GVA per establishment was reported in Mahe district of Puducherry of Rs 51.47 lakh. However, it only reported 2,856 establishments with a total of 5,927 workers employed. Satara district in Maharashtra also reported a higher GVA per establishment of Rs 15.79 lakh. It had a total of 1.33 lakh establishments and 2.42 lakh workers employed.

The report also found that in 237 districts, women constitute one-third of the total workforce in the unincorporated sector.

The latest MOSPI report follows an earlier statistical profile of the unincorporated sector across the country’s 46 million-plus cities, identified on the basis of Census 2011 population. “This marks the first initiative of the National Statistics Office (NSO), MoSPI, to disseminate district-level estimates from a largescale, nationwide survey,” it said in a release.