Casual labour, which is the type of employment provided by agriculture, yields much lower wages -- of the order of Rs 291 per day. Labour would not voluntarily shift to this lowest wage-rate sector unless it had no better option, observes Mahesh Vyas.
Nearly 31 million Indians are unemployed and looking for jobs. While economic growth has been humming along, the pace of job creation has been poor. A revealing excerpt from Dev Kar's India: Still A Shackled Giant.
Fitch Ratings on Wednesday said India's high fiscal deficit would pose a challenge in lowering the debt to GDP ratio, which is expected to rise above 90 per cent in the next five years. It said India entered the pandemic with little fiscal headroom from a rating perspective. Its general government debt/GDP ratio stood at 72 per cent in 2019, against a median of 42 per cent for 'BBB' rated peers.
Aiming to come up with a collective response to the government and employers' push for labour market reforms for increased employment and productivity, an international seminar of trade unionists got underway in New Delhi on Wednesday.
As per the survey, 7 per cent of employers anticipate an increase in payrolls, 3 per cent forecast a decrease and 54 per cent expect no change.
The report, titled Women and Labour Markets in Asia: Rebalancing for Gender Equality, noted that although Asia's economic growth of 6.2 per cent in 2000-2007 exceeded the
Global growth may be rebounding, but labour markets are not, or only very weakly and unevenly.
Observing that India's worsening COVID-19 situation and the strict measures to contain it have hit the economy hard, the rating agency said productive capacity has been severely disrupted since the start of the pandemic.
E-learning and work from home have forced a section of feature phones users to shift to smartphones.
Wall Street brokerage Goldman Sachs has lowered its estimate for India's economic growth to 11.1 per cent in fiscal year to March 31, 2022, as a number of cities and states announced lockdowns of varying intensities to check spread of coronavirus infections. India is suffering the world's worst outbreak of COVID-19 cases, with deaths crossing 2.22 lakh and new cases above 3.5 lakh daily. This has led to demand for imposition of nationwide strict lockdowns to stem the spread of the virus - a move that the Modi government has so far avoided after the economic devastation last year from a similar strategy.
Fitch Ratings on Thursday said the resurgence of COVID-19 infections may delay India's economic recovery, but won't derail it, as it kept the sovereign rating unchanged at 'BBB-' with a negative outlook. It projected a 12.8 per cent recovery in GDP in the fiscal year ending March 2022 (FY22), moderating to 5.8 per cent in FY23, from an estimated contraction of 7.5 per cent in 2020-21. Fitch had in June last year revised outlook for India to 'negative' from 'stable' on grounds that the coronavirus pandemic had significantly weakened the country's growth outlook and exposed the challenges associated with a high public debt burden.
Despite the large economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the markets have recovered sharply even though the performance among individual stocks has been quite polarised.
Survey calls for reorienting policies to promote young firms which have the potential to become big, rather than small MSME firms which remain small.
Improvements in the labour market has triggered this sentiment.
A collaborative approach can yield better results in reforming labour laws that can be implemented in the whole country, instead of different states following different norms in their own jurisdictions. That approach could also help the governments convince the trade unions to see merit in these reforms, says A K Bhattacharya.
India's economy has bounced back amazingly from the Covid-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdown over the last one year, but it is not out of the woods yet, according to the World Bank, which in its latest report has predicted that the country's real GDP growth for fiscal year 21/22 could range from 7.5 to 12.5 per cent.
The 457 visa programme, used by over 95,000 foreign workers, a majority of them Indians, was replaced on March 18 by a new Temporary Skills Shortage visa programme.
Days after keeping India's rating at lowest investment grade for 13th year in a row, the rating agency in a webinar said despite the contraction in GDP this year, the country continues to be an outperformer among the peer groups.
Deepening recession is expected to increase the number of unemployed women by up to 22 million as global job crisis could "worsen sharply" this year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned.
In her lawsuit, American national Tami Sulzberg alleges that at least 90 per cent of the US workforce of San Jose-based Happiest Minds, whose headquarters is in Bangalore, are South Asians, primarily from India.
Both have made factory jobs the centre of their economic agendas. Kanika Datta explains the practical limits to their ambitions.
It was the 15th straight week that claims held below 300,000
It is important to increase employment in general. It is even better to increase good quality jobs. Strategically, it is important to move people from farms to factories to improve overall labour productivity. It is important to improve job opportunities for women, for urbanites and for the educated. The Budget does not contain ideas to do any of this, points out Mahesh Vyas.
However, the government has enacted an important change to the fixed-term employment framework that may help companies in handing out contractual jobs to its existing permanent workforce.
Over 80% of graduate engineers passing out of universities in India are unemployable. With digitisation going mainstream, this skill deficit can be redressed through world-class training material, points out Ankit Shyamsukha, CEO, ICA Edu Skill.
The benchmark Sensex companies' underlying earnings per share are down 3 per cent (on a cumulative basis) since January 2015, against 25 per cent rise in the index value during the period
Mumbai saw an average 46 per cent decline in congestion during the morning rush hour on Tuesday. New Delhi's data also showed an average 34 per cent decline in congestion during morning.
There is no doubt that archaic labour laws governing employment of contract labour have fanned tensions at the workplace and need to be amended.
New businesses have been secured from the public and private sectors, as well as domestic and international markets.
We will find it difficult to exceed an average of 5 per cent growth in the medium term, warns Shankar Acharya, the former chief economic adviser.
India has a forest of labour laws, including anachronisms such as providing spittoons in the work place, and are so complex that most firms choose to stay small.
'The Indian State needs to focus on healthcare, education, infrastructure and law and order, and get out of all these regulatory cholesterols.' 'Then, India will fly.'
'We don't have the broad-based consensus in our coalition for me to assert that I can move forward in a big way for reform, says Indian prime minister.
It is necessary that at least three million additional jobs (if not more) are created every year to ensure that there isn't an increase in the stock of unemployed, says Mahesh Vyas.
Only 13 per cent employers in India have hiring plans in the July-Septermber quarter, says a survey.
While supporting greater flexibility in labour markets, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said there could be no 'uncritical endorsement' of the hire- and-fire approach.
Setting the bar high for 10 per cent growth, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday promised to explore FDI in retail, sort out problems in power sector and work for a flexible labour market.
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday pointed to a possible December interest rate "liftoff" but said rates would rise only slowly from then on to nurture the U.S. economic recovery.
"Indian markets (are) well placed to absorb the US Fed rate hike. Gradual approach in future increases augurs well for emerging markets," Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das has tweeted.
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