Unemployment in India

Living in denial about unemployment

Unemployment is significantly a major issue within the country and the world. Due to lack of enough opportunities, frequent agitations can be witnessed, lack of enough opportunities attributes to oversupply of labour, particularly in primary sector, which consequently results in low wage level, Health factor gets severely impacted among the vulnerable population. Recently, citing a reserve Bank of India (RBI) report said that 8 crore jobs have been created in the last 3-4 years. This had created a false narrative about unemployment. Issue of data collection is one of the important aspects that Contributes In not being able to tackle the problem of unemployment.

Importance and issue with data collection-

Data or figures helps us in understanding the depth of the problem, unless and until the problem is understood accurately, we won’t be able to understand the problem and ultimately the issue cannot be mitigated. Various government agencies end up accumulating the various data figures and representing largely the organized sector. For instances, as per the Periodic Labor Force Survey by National Statistical Office (NSO) 55% of workforce is employed in the organized sector. Whereas, as per the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) survey done by a private organization, 45% of the workforce is employed in the organized sector. This significantly indicates that 9 crore of population is being ignored with this minor difference. 90 to 94% of the employment is generated in the unorganized sector which neither have an adequate data collection method, nor accurate reports. Surveys such as Annual Survey of Unorganized Sectoral Enterprises (ASUS), undertakes the surveys of employment and realities of the unorganized sector. However various farmlands and small units among these unorganized sector seep through the crack when we’re going for the data collection which is important to note as these units contribute in large amount to the unorganized sector. Moreover, not having proper census figures, as we’re still relying on 2011 census Leads to huge discrepancies among these unorganized sectors while data collection.

Reasons for increase in unemployment level

• Lack of enough opportunities- Various factors attributes to lack of enough opportunities for instance limitation in public employment. Public expenditure and the role of public capital expenditures in the growth of GDP is very high whereas the private sector is not growing fast. However public sector has quite a very limited scope of generating employment, On the other hand private sector has this scope of employment. But the limited growth of private sector is where the problem arises.

• Stymied growth of manufacturing sector- Though not many large economies go through this, But Indian economy has jumped directly from the primary sector of the economy to the services sector of the economy the manufacturing sector has always remained stymied. Manufacturing sector have large potential to generate employment in bulk number.

• Over-dominance of agriculture or primary sector- In India over 45% of the population is engaged in primary sector which eventually results in disguised unemployment. The issue if deeply understood, is not that so many people are engaged in the agricultural sector but that they are engaged in conventional method of agriculture.

• This brings up in purview, a new issue i.e. Lack of skill updation.

• Lack of skill- There is no Industry-Institution nexus i.e. educational institutions operates in different spheres, and Industries want different requirements which raises the question of education system. More focus is given on theoretical aspects than on practical aspects of education.

Way forward

In order to tackle the issue of unemployment, Government needs to look for a proper data collection method. It needs to introduce the enabling system for institution-industry connect, providing methods for skill upgradation would do a lot good to the primary sector, campaigning to spread awareness. Moreover, promoting the startups and entrepreneurs across the country too would help. As per India’s demographic dividend, this is the window of opportunities where the youth can contribute in tackling the situation of unemployment and the problem can be solved in these 15 to 20 years.

By Khushi Rana