In April, the Railway Recruitment Board received over 1.6-crore registration for 35,000 jobs of typists, stenos, account clerks, ticket collectors etc. In Punjab, over 6-lakh students appear for an International English Language Testing System (IELTS), the examination that young students aspiring to migrate abroad must first clear. Such is the crave for leaving abroad that IELTS coaching has become a roaring business, estimated to be over Rs 1,100-crore. With agriculture becoming economically non-viable and with no jobs to look up to, Punjab youth is increasingly keen on leaving the country.
While you are still grappling with the long-term implications of growing unemployment in the country, here comes another shocker. The Bangalore-based Azaim Premji University has in its State of Working India-2019 report said that 50 lakh people lost their jobs between 2016 and 2018. A month earlier, a leaked Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18 report of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) had shown that 3.2 crore casual labourers in rural areas lost their job between 2011-12 and 2017-18. Of these, roughly 3-crore were the farm workers showing a decline of 40 per cent in jobs availability for farm workers. Some economists have analysed this report and found out that between 2011-12 and 2015-16, manufacturing jobs alone declined from 580.6 lakh to 480.3 lakh, showing a job loss exceeding 1-crore.
From unskilled to skilled, from uneducated to educated and even to those with high qualification, jobs have been shrinking. In Uttar Pradesh, 3,700 doctorate degree holders, 28,000 post-graduates and 50,000 graduates applied for just 62 jobs of peon. The job basically requires a minimum qualification of class V pass and the ability to ride a bicycle. And this is not the first time highly qualified people have applied for such low jobs. No wonder the Azim Premji University study shows that rising unemployment among the higher educated, the less educated as well as for the informal labour force there has been job losses and reduced work since 2016, the year demonetisation was announced.
At a time when massive unemployment prevails in the urban areas, the number of workers in agriculture too shrunk between 2004-05 and 2011-12. This is being hailed by mainline economists as a brighter side of the job loss nightmare that the country is witnessing. The argument is that the translocation of agricultural workforce to the cities is a sign of economic growth, and it is for the first time that such a clear sign of people moving away from the villages has been seen. Like his predecessor, even the new Chief Economic Advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian has called for shifting people from agriculture to the cities, which are in need of cheaper labour.
I find this argument regressive. It comes from the same flawed economic thinking that the World Bank/IMF has been promoting all these years. Since Indian economists, and considering most of them occupying higher positions in India have been trained abroad, this flawed thinking has become the unwritten policy design. Way back in 1996, the World Bank had directed India to move out 40-crore people from the rural to the urban areas in the next 20 years, by the end of 2015. More recently the National Skill Development Policy document had made a promise of reducing rural workforce from 57 to 38 per cent by the year 2022. This was based on the premise that urban areas need dehari mazdoor and that can only come from agriculture.
This is a sad reflection on the way economic prescription are borrowed and blindly implemented. In a country where 70 per cent work force still lives in the rural areas, imagine the futility of moving a large percentage of the population to swarm into the cities looking for menial jobs. I have always wondered why can’t Indian economists and policy makers for a change spell out a policy design that aims at making agriculture profitable and thereby revitalise the rural industry. Once there is more money in the hands of rural work force, more demand would be generated, and that would mean the wheels of economic growth will zoom to a much higher trajectory.
While Indian economists failed to emerge out of the World Bank’s blinkered economic thinking, China has taken a leap forward. With nearly 60 per cent of its population forced to move into the cities over the past few decades of rapid industrialisation, China now realises its mistake. With most of the skilled jobs in the cities moving away to Africa where a still cheaper labour force is available for the foreign investors, China has now launched a ‘reverse urbanisation’ programme to take care of the idle or underemployed work force.
According to a report in South China Morning Post, an estimated 70-lakh people, most with higher educational qualification, have moved back to the countryside last year, with 60 per cent reportedly getting back to farming. This also became essential considering the decline in domestic agricultural production as a result of which imports soared. With unemployment and underemployment rising, and with agricultural production dipping, China has taken the right step to what is proverbial known as killing two birds with one stone. Adequate rural infrastructure is being laid out, and a translocation subsidy is also being provided to those who opt for rural areas.
In India, there is no other alternative to creating more jobs than to strengthen agriculture, create more infrastructures in the rural areas, and at the same time provide for more social security in the form of public sector education and health services. With the introduction of PM-Kisan scheme, which initially promise a direct income support of Rs 6,000 per year for farmers, which I am sure will be enhanced in the times to come, the first step of providing an additional income into the hands of farmers has already been taken.
While economists are refusing to change, it’s the political thinking that is beginning to show signs of maturity. First, NDA announced PM-Kisan scheme, and this was followed by Congress with an electoral promise of Nyuntam Aay Yojna (NYAY) promising Rs 6,000 per month to the lowest 20 per cent of the population, a clear pointer to what political leadership sees as a road ahead for economic development that is more inclusive. Both the parties are now beginning to realise what I have said for long: agriculture alone has the potential to reboot the economy.#
कृषि क्षेत्र से ही पैदा होगा रोजगार Amar Ujala, April 19, 2019
कृषि क्षेत्र से ही पैदा होगा रोजगार Amar Ujala, April 19, 2019
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