A job to be done

Over the next 10 years, some 130 million young people will join the labour force across India. An inability to create jobs for them will prevent the country from reaping the much-touted demographic dividend. The Government needs to redraw various labour and industrial laws, and build a consensus on what a comprehensive employment generation policy ought to be. There are two realities in this respect that cannot be ignored: the petering out of the IT story and the oil boom, both of which will add to the numbers of the unemployed. Disruptions caused by the 2008-09 global economic and financial crisis led to significant job losses in India. The Trump administration’s protectionist policy will have some ramifications for jobs in the years ahead. Increased automation in manufacturing too has hurt the employment scenario. Alternative employment avenues need to be created, requiring reallocation of labour and capital. While recognising that there are too many people dependent on agriculture, it is necessary to accept, in view of the recent history of jobless growth, that manufacturing cannot absorb this slack.

It is important, therefore, to focus on agro-based industries in rural areas, besides employment-intensive, export-oriented sectors such as garments and leather. Rising employment in agro-industries, requiring relatively low levels of capital, can create demand for consumer goods. Hence, it would be a misnomer to isolate agriculture from the jobs story. Programmes such as Make in India and Skills India should develop a rural focus if entrepreneurs other than small retailers and restaurants are to emerge in the countryside. Meanwhile, organised retail has the potential to absorb thousands of people. As for the role of labour laws in holding up jobs in the organised sectors, provisions need to be in place to rehabilitate displaced workers. Small-scale industry needs to be encouraged by making ‘ease of business’ work for them.

For the world’s second-most populous nation and the seventh-largest economy, India has no reliable data on jobs. The Annual Survey of Industries provides data for workers and employees in 2.3 lakh factories covered by it. The Labour Bureau has begun tracking employment positions on a quarterly basis in eight sectors — manufacturing, IT, construction, trade, hospitality, healthcare, transportation and education. The last report, released in March, states that just 32,000 additional jobs were created in July-October 2016 compared to the preceding quarter in these eight sectors. There is an urgent need to have a system in place to collect such data, to know how we’re faring.

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