Pic courtesy: IVHQ
Look at these headlines. As many as 7,000 people, most of them college graduates, applied for 13 job vacancies for waiters in Maharashtra’s secretariat. Of the 4,607 applicants for 14 job vacancies of sweepers and sanitary workers in Tamil Nadu Assembly Secretariat, most have professional qualification of MBA, M Tech, B Tech, post graduate and graduates, reads another. And last year, in March 2018, an estimated 25 million people, more than the population of Australia, applied for about 90,000 positions in India Railways, screamed TV news channels.
In 2015, over 2.3 million candidates, including 2.2 million engineers and 255 Ph.D. holders had applied for 368 posts of peon in the Uttar Pradesh State Secretariat. A year later, a massive 93,000 candidates, including 20,000 graduates and 50,000 post graduates, had applied for the posts of 62 peons with a technical wing of the Uttar Pradesh police. Almost at the same time, another 19,000 people, including MBAs and post graduates had applied for 114 jobs of ‘safai karamchari (sweepers) with Amroha Municipal Corporation in Uttar Pradesh. There may not have been riots over increasing unemployment but not only in Uttar Pradesh is the job situation so appalling, it is equally bad across the country.
This is borne by the fact that India’s unemployment rate rose to a 45-year high during 2017-18, as a newspaper reported quoting the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) study conducted between July 2017 and June 2018. At a time when India’s economy has been on a growth trajectory in the past four years – growing at an average exceeding 7 per cent per annum – the failure to provide jobs to millions of people joining the employment queues is a clear cut pointer that relying on a higher GDP is not the answer to creating more jobs. Whether we like it or not, it is now becoming apparent that a higher GDP does not translate into more jobs.
Although the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley dismisses the study, saying “if the economy is growing at 12 per cent nominal growth in the past five years, it would be an economic absurdity to say that such a large growth, the highest in the world, doesn’t lead to the creation of jobs,” but the question that needs to be asked is where are the jobs? While all out efforts are being made to show that job creation is on track, a report from Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy (CMIE) deflates the claims when it shows that in the past one year, almost 11million people lost their jobs. “An estimated 9.1 million jobs were lost in rural India while the loss in urban India was 1.8 million jobs. Rural India accounts for two-thirds of India's population, but it accounted for 84 per cent of the job losses," the report said.
Growth without jobs is meaningless. The indication that a higher GDP does not automatically lead to more jobs was clearly visible in the UPA era when despite a high growth exceeding 8.3 per cent on an average, only 15 million jobs were created in the ten years, between 2004 and 2014. This was against the annual intake of about 12 million fresh entrants in the job market every year, which meant that against the need to provide 120 million people with employment, the UPA could provide only 15 million jobs. Ten years is not a small period, and it is here that policy makers failed to realise the inability of economic growth to create more jobs.
Still worse, a Planning Commission report had worked out that between 2004-05 and 2011-12 , about 140 million jobs were lost in agriculture. Many economists term the migration from agriculture to be a welcome sign. Going by the World Bank prescription, which was doled out way back in 1996, India was directed to go for a population shift, translocating 400 million from the rural to the urban areas in the next 20 years, by the year 2015. While most government economists have blindly followed the World Bank prescription, I have always termed these 400 million people being forced to migrate from the villages as ‘agricultural refugees’. In the absence of any alternative employment opportunity, these millions are swarming into the cities looking for menial jobs.
Without any definite strategy to employ them, no one knows what these millions will do in the urban centres. If the objective is to move people out of agriculture simply to meet the growing needs of cheaper labour for infrastructure, industry and real estate, in other words to provide for dehari mazdoor, there is something terribly wrong with the way dominant economic thinking is perceived. The general understanding being that those moving out of agriculture will be automatically absorbed by the manufacturing sector. It was primarily for this consideration that the National Skill Development Policy aimed at reducing the population in agriculture from 52 per cent to 38 per cent by the year 2022. But the reality is that during the period agriculture saw an unprecedented rate of migration, manufacturing too slumped, causing a loss of 53 million jobs. More recently, another 10.6 million jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector during the four year period 2011-12 to 2015-16.
Since agriculture is the biggest employer, employing 52 per cent of the population as per 2011 Census, the answer to the monumental employment crisis that India faces actually rests in the crop fields. If only agriculture can be turned economically viable and ecologically sustainable, it can easily take away much of the pressure the country faces in creating additional employment. All it requires is a paradigm shift in economic thinking, which begins by first treating agriculture as an economic activity, which has multi-faceted roles cut out. Making farm livelihoods economically sustainable should be the first step, with the objective to ensure gainful employment to marginalised communities. Once agriculture becomes economically viable, providing more income in the hands of 600 million people, it will reignite the rural based industry, and in the process trigger a reverse migration.
Agriculture can alleviate employment woes. The Tribune. Feb 15, 2019
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