Employment crisis in India

Context:

Growth rate of economy is consistently declining.

Introduction:

• Employment growth in India slowed down drastically during 2012-16, after marginal improvement in 2010-12, as per the latest employment data collected by labour bureau.
• India’s may be the fast growing economy but on series of counts the growth is declining.

Related statistics:

• Unemployment rate is rising.
• 9 million jobs created during NDA-I
• 5% of labour force jobless in the FY-2016.
• In 2015, 19000 jobs lost in Jewelry sector.
• 11, 000 jobs lost in handloom sector.
• Job creation slipped from 2012.
• The Labour Bureau’s Annual Household Employment survey shows a decline in total employment from 480.4 million (2013-14) to 467.6 million (2015-16).
• The only sector to have witnessed a significant increase in employment was wholesale and retail trade where employment increased from 43.7 million to 48.1 million.
• In the manufacturing sector (both organised and unorganised) employment declined from 51.4 million to 48.1 million over the same time period.

Challenge:

• Our youth are getting more and more educated but the growth of employment is not satisfactory.
• To expand the job creation is the biggest challenge.
• Low growth in manufacturing sector.
• 5-6 million OBCs graduate every year.
• Paucity of data

Reasons:

• People lost jobs because of cash crunch after demonetization.
• Credibility of labour bureau data. There are some issues with the data.
• Lack of planning.
• Growth rate of economy is consistently declining.
• There is no correlation between GDP growth and employment rate.

Way ahead:

• India needs to grow fast if it wants to absorb large number of labour force.
• Increase in expenditure
• Young’s are getting more and more educated. There is increase in secondary enrollment
• Fiscal stimulus
• Careful planning in schemes
• Huge infrastructure to be created.
• Economy cannot be run on single engine that is on public sector alone, so private sectors should come forward.
• Agriculture sector have to sustain the growth of poor people.
• Export need to enhance.
• Export manufacturing sectors
• Education system needs to be re-oriented towards vocational and practical teachings.
• Participation of women in workforce.
• Strengthen the ” make in India ” initiative
• There is less number of government jobs in various fields like judges, teachers, doctors etc. There is need to generate more jobs in public sector.
• Special packages are needed for labour-intensive industries to create jobs
• There should be cluster development to support job creation in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).
• An industrial and trade policy is needed. The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) is preparing an industrial policy.

Conclusion:

Government schemes rarely create many jobs. International evidence is that when consumer demand grows consistently, whether from domestic or international markets, that is when jobs grow. That requires an industrial policy. Ease of doing business improvement and infrastructure investment increases should improve the economic environment. But most importantly India needs a robust industrial policy.