ASSOCIATED PRESS File photo of a protest against unemployment led by the Trinamool Congress. The issue has become the most significant in India's politics in the past two years as economists say the twin economic shocks of demonetisation and Goods and Services Tax have adversely affected jobs more in the informal sector, which provides employment for the majority.

NEW DELHI―Five million men, most of whom belonged to vulnerable sections of society and worked in the informal sector, lost their jobs over the two years beginning late 2016 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation, says a new report. The ‘State of Working India 2019’ report was released on Tuesday by the Centre for Sustainable Employment (CSE), Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. “This is a net figure and therefore, whatever jobs may have been added elsewhere, there have been enough jobs lost, on balance five million less work opportunities were there, so that is not a good thing for the economy. Particularly given that we have been seeing what appears to be a strong GDP growth. So, in this case, to end up with net job losses is not a good thing. We should be seeing a workforce increase rather than decrease,” said Prof. Amit Basole, the lead author of the report who heads CSE. Basole added that data shows that the fall in jobs occurred around the time of demonetisation (in the four-month period between September and December 2016) and plateaued by December 2018 (September-December 2018 is the last four-monthly period the researchers looked at).

This is a net figure and therefore, whatever jobs may have been added elsewhere, there have been enough jobs lost, on balance five million less work opportunities were there, so that is not a good thing for the economy. Particularly given that we have been seeing what appears to be a strong GDP growth. Amit Basole

The report says that job losses began around the time that Modi announced demonetisation, but is careful to add that it could not establish a “causal relationship” based on the data available. When HuffPost India asked Basole what could be the possible reasons for loss of jobs and employment opportunities, he said, “Apart from demonetisation and GST, as far as informal economy is concerned, I don’t see any other reasons.” Modi, who is currently campaigning for a second term at India’s helm for the BJP, has avoided mentioning at his rallies the lofty promises on employment he had made before winning a massive mandate in 2014. Not only has his government been unable to provide meaningful jobs to all, policy missteps like demonetisation have only worsened the crisis in the Indian economy. The government has also been accused of suppressing unfavourable jobs reports from its own agencies such as the NSSO. A Business Standard story based on the report said that India’s unemployment rate was at a 45-year high in 2017-18. After an analysis of the labour force participation rate (LFPR) and workforce participation rate (WPR) for men with differing education levels, the CSE report says that the decline in both has largely been driven by less-educated men in both urban and rural areas. It then builds on this finding to conclude that, “...there is a large differential impact by level of education. This is consistent with the idea that the informal sector, where we can expect the share of less educated men to be higher, was hit hardest by demonetisation as well as the introduction of GST.” Evidently, the most vulnerable sections of the economy had been hit hard. However, when asked why data for job losses for women was not tabulated, Prof Basole explained, “We feel less comfortable with the women’s figures that CMIE gives. We compared Labour Bureau 2016 with CMIE 2016 since it is closeby in time. Those are the two we chose to compare and we saw that the comparability is good for men and not good for women.”