Where are the jobs? Being in denial over unemployment woes won't help Modi govt -Rajesh Mahapatra

-Hindustan Times

To begin with, it is imperative that the government and the ruling coalition acknowledge the challenge, and not be dismissive about it. Ambiguous expressions such as “promoting self-employment” do not help.

It is difficult to disagree when BJP president Amit Shah says it’s impossible to provide jobs to everyone in a country of 1.25 billion people. It is also equally absurd to agree with him that reports of rising unemployment are a media creation. The reports are based on the findings of the government’s own surveys and disclosures made by companies, either through earnings reports or official statements, which suggest that the pace of job creation in India slowed over the past decade. And there has been no perceptible change in the trend even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge of the nation in 2014. Shah should know playing down the employment challenge will be repeating the mistake the previous UPA regime made, in ignoring the downside risks to the India growth story of its time.

So, what really is the scale of this challenge?

In a seminal paper titled Employment, Education and the State, economist Sudipto Mundle sums it up well: India’s core labour force, estimated at about 430 million, is growing 1.5% annually, which means it will add six to eight million young workers each year over the next decade or so. In addition, there are around 13 million openly unemployed, 52 million underemployed and another 52 million, mostly women, who are not in the labour force due to lack of adequate opportunities. In other words, there is a backlog of 117 million people. If this backlog is to be cleared over the next 15 years and the new entrants joining the labour force every year are to find employment, India will need to add 15 million new jobs annually. That is the scale of the employment challenge India faces today.

There are no easy answers to this monumental challenge; nor will it be prudent to expect quick results even if the right answers were found.

To begin with, it is imperative that the government and the ruling coalition acknowledge the challenge, and not be dismissive about it. Ambiguous expressions such as “promoting self-employment” do not help. If the government and businesses find comfort in pursuing policies that displace labour or have a bias against creating new jobs, it affects prospects of all kinds of employment, including self-employment. That is how it has been, all these years. It is time the government moved to correct the course.

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