The Employment Challenge in India: Hundred Years from ‘Ten days that shook the World’

Abstract

Hundred years from the Bolshevik Revolution that shook the world, workers around the globe are facing new challenges. Throughout a long stretch of the global South, job creation is sluggish, real wages are stagnant, and working conditions are getting harsher and there is a growing disjoint between work and wealth. Against this backdrop, in this paper we flag the employment challenges facing India at present. Using a novel 4-quadrant compartmentalisation, we observe that the three major challenges are—absolute lack of employment opportunities; chronic unemployment and intermittent employment; and substantial underemployment and loss of person days. Two further related challenges are low returns from work and skill mismatch. All these markers have worsened in the last decade which also witnessed massive job loss for casual workers. This is perhaps a natural sequel to the economic boom built on mass casualisation of workforce over the previous two decades. At first sight of slowdown, the axe has fallen on these casual workers. Mismatch between sectoral shares in output and employment also causes wage disparity and aggravates inequality. With production increasingly set to become machine and AI driven, labour redundancy and skill mismatch is expected to worsen in coming years. We must press for a separate employment–incomes policy rather than continue with the false hope that economic growth will solve the employment conundrum.