The PMO’s tweet on Tuesday came after protests by disgruntled job seekers in some states, critique by experts and opposition parties over the Centre’s handling of the country’s unemployment predicament. In January this year, students and cops clashed in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP) as the former protested against alleged irregularities in the Railway Recruitment Board's examination process.
Many experts have opined time and again that the economy is not generating enough jobs and that the fundamentals need to be corrected in order to be more buoyant to occurrences like the Omicron or COVID.
Although manifesting some respite, the latest periodic labour force survey by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme implementation released on Tuesday showed that India’s unemployment rate plunged further to 4.2 per cent in 2020-21 despite the said period witnessing two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic which had left millions of workers jobless and led to the suspension of field work. It stood at 4.8 per cent in 2019-20, 5.8 per cent in 2018-19 and 6.1 per cent in 2017-18
But the big question here is if PM Modi’s latest employment push to generate 10 lakh jobs is, considering how deep the country’s job crisis runs.
India’s Job Predicament
Expressed in percentage, the unemployment rate is defined as the share of people who are without any job. The unemployment rate for a month is calculated by manifesting the total count of unemployed persons in India as a percentage of the total number of people in the labour force. However, the country’s actualities are often concealed behind numbers and the job crisis in India is no exception. Joblessness in the country essentially relates to educated young adults seeking jobs in the formal economy. This is critical as the informal economy provides jobs to 90 per cent of the labour force, which comprises poor, semi-skilled and unskilled people, and generates half the economic output.
Catch-22 Situation
Here’s where the predicament lies. If a person is more literate, he/she is less likely to accept a poorly paid, informal job and may continue to be jobless, whereas, the one who is less educated will take up anything he/she gets and keep away from the formal economy, and thereby, out of the formal calculation. That’s why it’s hardly surprising that highly educated and skilled people such as engineers, law graduates, MBAs etc. applying for badly paid, unskilled jobs, become eye-catching news.
Catalysts And Perils
Notwithstanding how the government fares on the job front, there are some catalysts, both intrinsic and extrinsic. As many as 12 million people hit the employment age in India every year, while, the economy has not grown commensurately to absorb this demographic growth. And to make matters worse, the pandemic sabotaged everything. Rising joblessness has myriad perils, one is diminishing intake of and demand for goods and services that decelerates the economy and, amongst many other things, getting jobs gets even tougher.
Where Are The Jobs?