An overwhelming proportion of the unemployed declare their nature of occupation as students. In the quarter ended December 2021, 77% of the unemployed who were actively looking for jobs were students. This syncs well with another data, that 77% of the unemployed are between 15 and 24 years of age, reveals Mahesh Vyas.
The auto ancillary industry - one of the worst hit due to the labour exodus - will need at least three months to get its factories up and running.
As voting begins in Bihar in the first phase of assembly elections on Wednesday, the fate of political leaders depends on how the electorate perceives they can solve ground-level issues from reverse migration to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is more worrying, according to the report, is the fact that in over 20 per cent of the topic caseload districts where the second has ebbed, the third wave has set in firmly, which was only 5 per cent a month ago.
The cost of not vaccinating the entire population quickly will be far higher than bearing the entire cost of vaccination, points out Prosenjit Datta.
Net job creation in the economy fell by 16.9 lakh in FY21 over the previous fiscal, shows an SBI Research analysis of EPFO payroll data. However, the FY21 numbers are better than the FY20 net job creation, which had declined by 28.9 lakh, further cementing the view that the economy is not creating new employment opportunities. The latest EPFO data shows that net new EPF subscribers stood at 94.5 lakh in FY21, and NPS added 5.82 lakh, taking the cumulative net addition to 100.4 lakh, which is marginally down from 102.3 lakh in FY20.
Amid fears of a third wave of coronavirus pandemic and hardening of retail inflation, the Reserve Bank is likely to maintain status quo on interest rate and watch the developing macroeconomic situation for some more time before taking any decisive action on monetary policy. The RBI is scheduled to announce its bi-monthly monetary policy review on August 6 at the end of the three-day meeting -- August 4-6 -- of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). The RBI Governor-headed six-member MPC decides on the key policy rates.
The count of the unemployed mounted to 38.7 million in December 2020 compared to 27.4 million in November, registering a massive increase of 11.3 million, reveals Mahesh Vyas.
'We are today worse off today compared to where we were two years ago by as much as 43 per cent,' notes Mahesh Vyas.
Hopefully, the small recovery in the labour force and employment seen in the September-December 2017 wave will gather momentum in the coming waves, says Mahesh Vyas.The challenge, says Mahesh Vyas, is to find the corresponding jobs for these aspirants.
Violence is just too stark, too TRP friendly and so it gets a lot of attention in the media. But the crime of discrimination is much worse because it is much greater, it attracts no attention and it has no recourse, says Mahesh Vyas.
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.
A new paper by blames 'jobs deficit' for the decline in female labour force.
Partial lockdown measures may impact movement of labour & goods, they say.
In an economy such as India's, jobs create themselves to a large extent, which is why the rate of unemployment is perennially low, at two-three per cent.
The addition of a million jobs as promised by Tejashwi Yadav would make a big impact. But the electorate needs to raise its expectations, notes Mahesh Vyas.
'The workers's dance of wilful destruction has the potential to kill all investments planned in India by any foreign entity,' argues Dr Sudhir Bisht.
Speaking at an Assocham event, Modi said the recent cut in corporate tax has brought rates to all-time low for businesses, adding that labour force should also be taken care of.
While the denial rate has dropped slightly to 21 per cent in 2019 from 24 per cent in 2018, the National Foundation for American Policy has said it is much higher for Indian IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro and very low for American companies like Amazon and Google. For instance, the denial rate for TCS and Infosys in 2019 was 31 per cent and 35 per cent respectively, whereas for Wipro it was 47 per cent and 37 per cent for Tech Mahindra. On the other hand, the denial rate for the new H-1B petitions in 2019 was just four per cent each for Amazon and Google. The denial rate for Microsoft during the same period was six per cent, and Facebook along with Walmart was just three per cent each.
The statement comes in the wake of two independent members of the NSC, P C Mohanan and J V Meenakshi, quitting the Commission over disagreements with the government on the back-series GDP data and delay in release of labour force survey. Mohanan was also the acting chairperson of the Commission.
Can 3 crore out of the 8.9 crore young male population of the nine states set off on a pilgrimage that extends for about a month? If yes, then what can we infer regarding the state of the young working population in these states, asks Mahesh Vyas.
'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.'
The problem of unemployment is spread across the economy.
'From the time India liberalised in the 1990s, the government has policies are for facilitating the growth of the manufacturing sector.' 'The policies were put in the hope that growth of the manufacturing sector will lead to increased employment,' points out Chidambaran G Iyer, Senior Fellow, Pahle India Foundation.
In the past 12 months, since September 2020, the net cumulative increase in employment has been just 44,483. This is negligible -- just 0.04 million on a base of over 400 million jobs, reveals Mahesh Vyas.
Since 2014, India has left its moorings as a pluralist, modern, secular State because that is how the BJP wants it to be, notes Aakar Patel.
Workers moving out of agriculture to the rural labour force were largely getting absorbed in construction activities
While overall employment rose from 456 mn to 463 mn between FY11 and FY15, with farm employment falling by 26 mn over the same period, the net addition to employment over the entire four year period was a mere 7 mn.
Economy has become a major cause of concern for the new government with GDP dropping to 5.8 per cent in the last quarter of the 2018-19.
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.
The government's decision to release the reports comes two days after over 200 scholars from across the globe issued a statement demanding release of all withheld reports produced by the NSO, including the household consumer expenditure survey that was junked.
The IMF on Tuesday projected an impressive 12.5 per cent growth rate for India in 2021, stronger than that of China, the only major economy to have a positive growth rate last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Washington-based global financial institution, in its annual World Economic Outlook ahead of the annual Spring meeting with the World Bank, said the Indian economy is expected to grow by 6.9 per cent in 2022. Notably in 2020, India's economy contracted by a record eight per cent, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said as it projected an impressive 12.5 per cent growth rate for the country in 2021.
'Over 27 million youngsters in their 20s lost their jobs in April.' '33 million men and women in their 30s lost jobs in April,' points out Mahesh Vyas.
'The impact of economic shocks on the labour markets is usually on the young who delay their entry in response to a fall in job opportunities,' says Mahesh Vyas.
'Of the 9.5 million unemployed who stopped looking for jobs, nearly seven million were young.' 'Is it possible that the young decided to continue with studies rather than look for jobs?' asks Mahesh Vyas.
Women and children have been given short shrift with these crucial sectors facing substantive budgetary cuts, discovers Rashme Sehgal.
Nearly 490 million people of working age are outside the bounds of India's unemployment assessments. A decrease in the unemployment rate could signal economic growth, but could just as well mean that people have given up looking for work. A revealing excerpt from Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran and Tata Chief Economist Roopa Purushothaman's Bridgital Nation: Solving Technology's People Problem.
The key to job creation is to increase labour participation - draw more people into the labour force and to provide them formal jobs in the organised sectors. Self-employment is not job creation, says, Mahesh Vyas.
That is the number for job creation that India needs to achieve, argues T N Ninan.
Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan says the government should take advantage of the peaks in the Indian equity markets right now and sell stakes in PSUs while prioritising spending to get the economy back on track. The upcoming Budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1 should look to provide "relief to the poorer households and small and medium enterprises," he said. And then move on to getting the economy back on track.