The Editorial Analysis: At the Centre of Job Creation

 

Unemployment in India: Relevance

• GS 3 Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization, of resources, growth, development and employment.

 

Job crisis in India: Context

• Recently, the PM has announced that 10 lakh government jobs will be provided over the next 18 months on a “mission mode”.

 

10 lakh jobs: Message of the announcement

• One, the creation of employment is indeed a problem and can no longer be hidden from the public discourse.
• Two, the private sector, especially modern sectors such as the service and manufacturing sectors, have not created many jobs.
• Three, the government in the Nehruvian scheme of development occupied an important place in the labour market.
• And four, the NDA government has blown the 2024 general election bugle.

 

 

Issues in employment trends

Data reliability

• Last year for which we have information on employment in the organised sector from the Directorate General of Employment and Training is 2012.
• The present government is at present relying on the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation/National Pension System/Employees’ State Insurance Scheme registrations and exits as indicators of the formal labour market.
• This could be misleading as companies may be increasing registrations to cross the threshold to become eligible to fall under any of these. Hence, this might be more a case of formalisation rather than employment generation.

 

Vacancies in the government departments

• Media reports show that more than 85% of those aspiring for those 10 lakh jobs could be consumed by existing vacancies in Central government departments (8,72,243).
• In that sense, the pr1onouncement possibly does not indicate 10 lakh new jobs.

 

PSUs

• Third, 241 central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) have been shedding jobs in recent years — jobs declined from 10.84 lakh in 2017-18 to 10.71 lakh in 2018-19 and to 9.22 lakh in 2019-20.

 

Role of private sector

• The private sector creates jobs in response to market forces and while taking into consideration radically altering technological developments.
• Projects in the modern private sector consume a lot of capital to generate very few jobs.

 

Way forward

• The government should re-establish its role as the principal employment generator through jobs in its ministries and CPSEs and through assured employment generation programmes like MGNREGA.

 

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