Development sans job growth is not healthy

High and rising unemployment among educated youth in India stand out as the major point of concern in the latest ‘India Employment Report” 2024 jointly prepared by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and Institute of Human Development (IHD) and released on March 26.

The report notes that seven to eight million youth of employment age (15-59 years) are being added to the nation’s labour force every year and proportion of this age group in the population has risen from 61 per cent in 2011 to 64 per cent in 2021 and likely to be around 65 per cent by 2030.

While the fact that the proportion of educated youth going up from 18 per cent to 35 between the year 2000 and 2022 is a heartening feature, the decline of youth from 52 per cent to 37 per cent in economic activities should be a cause of worry for the nation’s planners.

The report highlights that 82.9 per cent of the unemployed population consisted of youth in 2022.

This has led to educated unemployed youth representing 65.7 per cent of the total unemployed population in 2022.

This figure stood at 54.2 per cent in 2000. While jobless growth has constantly been a leading and worrisome feature of economic development in India, the latest report proves that there is a serious disconnect between the kind of education being dished out from the places of learning and the personnel required by the industry.

Even previous studies had pointed out that nearly three-fourths of the engineers being turned out by the vast number of engineering and technology institutes across the nation were unemployable.

The ILO-IHD report puts the share of technically qualified workers at 15.62 per cent.

Of these only 4.09 per cent had some kind of vocational training. It is also a poignant commentary that 90 per cent of the jobs created in 2023 were in the informal sector and even half the jobs created in the formal sector were of informal nature.

All that it implies is that there is a growing trend towards casualization, contractorisation and outsourcing of jobs where the talents and skill are either not required or remain unrewarded.

The skewed nature of gender participation too is noteworthy. Absorption of women in the labour force is low with Female Labour Participation Rate (LFPR) pointing at men-women ratio being 3:1.

The report emphasises stimulus for apprenticeship as it remains very low i.e., of around 120,000 establishments, only 25,000 are offering apprenticeships.

With major lacunae identified, the five-point policy agenda proposed by the report would require urgent attention.

The report calls for making production and growth more employment-intensive; improving the quality of jobs and creating conducive environment through inclusive urbanisation and migration policy; tackling labour market inequalities; enhancement of skill training opportunities and facilitating youth’s ability to connect with opportunities; and, taking cognizance of emerging technologies and synchronizing the educational and skill imparting centres with the new changes.

One hopes the new dispensation at the Centre would initiate steps to bring about changes in policies to see that economic development incentivizes employment generation too.