Abstract
This chapter aims to understand and document the challenges facing Kerala’s labour market and argues for specific industrial and employment policies to meet these challenges. Kerala’s remarkable achievements in the social spheres, including health, education and land reforms, have helped the state’s population achieve a considerable degree of upward social and economic mobility. Kerala’s economy has been growing at fast rates from the late 1980s onwards, aided to a great extent by the remittances sent to the state by Malayalee workers in foreign countries. However, Kerala’s population has now started ageing, and the state’s economy is dependent on migrant workers from other Indian states, especially for manual jobs. At the same time, the creation of high value-adding jobs in Kerala in the services and manufacturing sectors has not been adequate, particularly in comparison with the rate of supply of educated workers in the state. Given such a context, Kerala now aims to set up a modern industrial sector that builds on the specific advantages enjoyed by the state with respect to natural resources and people. There is great potential in Kerala for the promotion of food- and agro-based industries; specific segments of chemical, electronic and engineering industries; and also industries based on advanced technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and life sciences. There is also great scope for a revival of entrepreneurship in the state, harnessing, in particular, the energies of the large body of Malayalee engineers and professionals worldwide.
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Notes
- 1.
NSS defines usual principal-status workers as persons who worked for a relatively longer part of the 365 days preceding the date of survey. From the rest of the population, NSS identifies usual subsidiary-status workers as persons who worked for at least 30 days during the reference period of 365 days preceding the date of survey.
- 2.
Main workers are persons who worked for a major part of the reference period (i.e. for six months or more). Persons who worked for less than six months during the reference period are termed ‘marginal workers’.
- 3.
According to Krishnamurty (1983), share of non-agricultural activities in total employment was high in Kerala even in 1911. During the half century that followed, there was further shift in the State’s occupational structure to manufacturing and services. See Krishnamurty (1983), Table 6.6 and pp. 541–544.
- 4.
See MYS for all states: http://planningcommission.nic.in/data/datatable/0306/Databook_June2014.pdf.
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Thomas, J.J., Jayesh, M.P. (2019). Labour Market in Kerala: Examining the Role of Industrial and Employment Policies. In: Shyam Sundar, K.R. (eds) Globalization, Labour Market Institutions, Processes and Policies in India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7111-0_19
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