Commentary – 2
A stark statistic from a Business Standard story (June 2022): “Over 94% of 276.9 million informal sector workers registered on the e-Shram portal have a monthly income of Rs 10,000.” More: “Age-wise analysis of the data show that 61.72 per cent of the registered workers on the portal are of the age from 18 years to 40 years, while 22.12 per cent are of the age from 40 years to 50 years. The proportion of the registered workers aged above 50 years is 13.23 per cent, while 2.93 per cent of workers are aged between 16 and 18 years… Gender analysis shows that 52.81 per cent of registered workers are female and 47.19 per cent are male…Occupation wise, agriculture is at the top with 52.11 per cent of enrolments done by those related to the farm sector followed by domestic and household workers at 9.93 per cent and constructions workers at 9.13 per cent.”
Ajit Ranade wrote in Mint (July 2022): “About 13 million young people join the workforce in India every year. Even assuming only half of them seek jobs, i.e., a workforce participation rate of 50%, we still need 6-7 million new jobs (or livelihoods) every year. These are in addition to the churn among existing job holders, which add to the count of total job seekers. Except for a few thousand, most new jobs are not created by large corporates, public or private. These jobs don’t even come from the railways, post office department, the police or the armed forces. They mostly come from small, medium and tiny one-person enterprises. Thus, 6 million new jobs need at least 60,000 businesses to be born every year. Hence, our clarion call for job creation should be accompanied by a stirring call to create enterprises. What does it take to set up new businesses at such scale? Are these to be born mainly in urban areas? Do the midwives at birth present a formidable hurdle? What is the burden of formal registration, tax compliance and other regulations, including at the local and state levels? Will these enterprises have high infant mortality? Do many more therefore need to take birth? Will an inspector raj thwart ambitions?”
He adds: “Among graduates, we see the strange phenomenon of multiple attempts taken at exams for government jobs. These jobs are a lottery to which millions of youth seem addicted, and waste precious years of their early adulthood. The success rate is barely 1%; yet, aspirants spend fortunes on preparatory tuitions and keep trying until their age limit is breached.”
Vivek Kaul wrote in Mint (October 2022) about this love young Indians have for (diminishing) government jobs: “A good portion of what should be a youth’s working life is spent waiting. This is clearly visible in the unemployment data published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. In September 2022, the rate of unemployment for those in the 20-24-years age category stood at 41.9%. The rate of unemployment for those in the 25-29-years age category was at 9.8%. Beyond that, unemployment was almost non-existent, with the rate for those in the 30-34-years age category being 0.8%. Now what does this tell us? It tells us that unemployment as a phenomenon almost evaporates as soon as an individual’s age turns 30. By this time, age catches up and many individuals become ineligible for most government jobs or the number of attempts they can take to write the exam finally runs out. This forces them into taking on an informal job in the private sector or alternatively look at becoming self-employed. And that leads to the rate of unemployment falling for Indians in their thirties.”
Shankar Acharya writing in Business Standard (September 200): “India’s population is still young, with about 55 per cent below 30 and over a quarter below 15. Its billion-strong working age population embodies an enormous potential for jobs and economic growth. About 19 years ago, I had warned that this demographic dividend could be squandered in the absence of right policies. Since then, successive governments have persisted with wrong or weak policies and programmes, including a poor public education and skilling system, an extremely complex and anti-job-creating maze of labour laws and regulations, foreign trade and exchange rate policies that discourage labour-using exports and import-competing domestic production, weak infrastructure that undermines productivity and connectivity and avoidable policy shocks like demonetisation. The Covid pandemic hasn’t helped. There is mounting evidence that the dividend is dissipating, with seriously adverse consequences for young India.”
Rathin Roy: “You have two options. Either you accept that you are going to become a more expensive country, or you put in place a plan to produce the things you take from China, more cheaply in India. India has been in a situation where we can produce high-end products for our consumers, but when it comes to mass market items, we are uncompetitive, compared to other countries, not just China.”
