Applicants in queue for the garbage collection jobs at Municipal corporation office in sector 17 Chandigarh on Friday, September 21 2018. Express Photo by Sahil Walia

India’s employment generation rate has declined post-2013. The State of Working India (SWI) report by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University shows that the rate of joblessness among the youth at 16%. The report points to the fact that India is faring poorly in converting its high economic growth rate into jobs for educated youth. All the sates, especially north Indian states are showing major decline. Gujarat, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh are shining as rare exceptions. While Gujarat and Karnataka have managed to maintain their unemployment rate unchanged, Chhattisgarh clocked a decline in its unemployment rate.

Source: State of Working India (SWI) report by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University

The report, released this week on the occasion of Make in India anniversary, highlighted key reasons behind the grave situation in India’s job sector. IE quoted lead author of the report, Amit Basole, as saying that the unorganized manufacturing sector in India is in a bad shape which hampers the overall growth of this sector.

Talking to IE Uma Rani, Senior Economist, Research Department, International Labour Office, Geneva, said, “Despite high economic growth rate in the last decade, far fewer jobs have been created than is desirable. Underemployment, unemployment, and informal employment are also increasing”.

According to the report, this phenomenon of massive joblessness among educated youth is manifested in various ways. The endless charm of public sector and government jobs is one of them. Almost every public sector job is highly over-subscribed. Millions apply for few job opportunities. In 2017, for 6000 jobs in the Class IV or Group D category in West Bengal, the lowest category job profile in government services, 2.5 million appeared for the exam. Many of them were graduates and postgraduate degree holders. In 2015, 2.3 million applied for around 400 Class IV jobs in Uttar Pradesh, 150,000 of them were graduates.

The Report pointed at an urgent need to comprehensively think about jobs and for the government to formulate a focused National Employment Policy in close collaboration with states.