Last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet initiative Make In India, aimed at turning the country into a manufacturing hub, completed its first year. While the government has announced a slew of measures to make it easier to set up and run firms in the country, the grand plan of creating 100 million additional jobs by the year 2022 in the manufacturing sector still seems like a distant dream.In the financial year 2014-'15, the creation of new jobs in eight key sectors of the economy was at its lowest point in the last quarter, according to the 25th Quarterly Report on Changes in Employment, compiled by the Labour Bureau based on surveys of key sectors. The report said that only 64,000 new jobs were created between January-March this year as compared to 117,000 jobs created between October-December last year.But compared to the same period last year, new jobs increased even in January-March period. In January-March 2014, the number of jobs actually fell by 36,000.Overall, more than 521,000 jobs were generated in the country in 2014-'15 as compared to only about 276,000 jobs generated between 2013-'14.

The largest number of jobs in the last quarter were once again created in the Information Technology and back-end Business Processing Outsourcing units, which recorded a net increase of 37,000 jobs. This accounts for more than half of all the jobs created in the January-March quarter this year.This comes at the heels of the prime minister’s push for the information technology sector which, he said in 2014, could become the “shining light of Brand India”. With the launch of Make In India last year, however, the government has been putting more thrust on creating employment opportunities in the core manufacturing sectors.However, little seems to have been achieved on that front. Jobs in the metal sector increased by only 1,000 in the last quarter after declining by 20,000 between October-January last year.

Similarly, the gems and jewellery sector did not perform very well either. Jobs in the sector fell for two quarters in a row with 11,000 jobs disappearing between October 2014-March 2015.An area of concern could be the performance of the handloom and powerloom sector, which the government is keen to promote. The government announced policy for e-marketing of handloom products. Modi has also appealed to the film industry to popularise handloom products by using them for costumes.The sector, however, is experiencing a crunch. The powerloom and handloom sector has cut jobs consistently over the last year. In this quarter too, the sector saw a contraction of 2,000 jobs while the previous three quarters combined saw reduction of another 9,000 jobs.However, the sector did find some bright spots. The automobiles sector recorded 20,000 new jobs between January and March after slumping in the October-December quarter when it cut 23,000 jobs.The quarter also saw strong job growth in export-oriented units which saw 73,000 workers being hired as compared to reduction of 2,000 jobs in the same quarter last year.“Sequentially, the numbers do not mean much, as companies follow a particular production cycle and employment is linked to that,” Rituparna Chakraborty, president of the Indian Staffing Federation told the Business Standard. “However, the numbers are very encouraging on an annual basis, showing a bright future for jobs in the coming years."