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Higher hires

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published Published on Feb 9, 2011   modified Modified on Feb 9, 2011
In October last year, the ministry of labour released the results of its first large-scale survey of employment and unemployment in India. The headline number was this: 9.4 per cent of India’s labour force is unemployed. An enviable number by world standards in the middle of recession. Except, of course, that number means precisely nothing. The problem lies in figuring out exactly who counts as unemployed. Given the nature of our restrictions on employment, the difficulties involved in expanding “formal” jobs — both because of various regulations that limit enterprise size, and archaic labour laws — the traditional, Western, notion of unemployment is of only limited use in India.

Economists studying India have worried about this for decades.

Unemployment, they have pointed out, is a luxury. To be able to be actively looking for a job requires you to have a safety net — social, state-provided or kin-based — that feeds and clothes you while you do so. Enough Indians simply don’t have the resources to do that, and so they aren’t unemployed. But they aren’t in the right jobs, either. Now comes news that the ministry of labour intends to expand their survey, earlier conducted only in 300 districts, to all 600-plus districts of the country. But if they wish to improve on the twice-a-decade estimates provided by the National Sample Survey Organisation, there are a few crucial changes they must make.

First, they need to break out of the template set by more formal markets. More crucial than that 9.4 per cent number, for example, was the throwaway line that “the survey results show that 436 persons out of 1,000 persons are either employed in seasonal or ad-hoc type of enterprises.” That may not be the fault of the ministry, but it reveals that expansion geographically should not be prioritised over better survey design. Last year’s report complains that “measures of employment/unemployment which capture intermittent unemployment and seasonality... could not be followed due to a shorter survey period.” That needs fixing. The NSSO also gives us data about how much people earn from their jobs, and whether it needs supplementing. That, too, is essential to figuring out the true nature of unemployment and underemployment in India — an essential input for policy-making that wishes to create space for India’s aspirational young people.

The Indian Express, 9 February, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/higher-hires/747827/


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