Table of Contents
Introduction
The one common problem you will always get to hear from India youth is unemployment. With a huge population of 1.4 billion people, India faces a lot of challenges and one of the biggest of them that always remains in the list is “Unemployment”.
India is always kept under scrutiny for the high unemployment rates as most of the population of India is young and always seeks for a quality job that can fulfill their needs and aspirations.
As the world economy is one the verge of recession for last 1-2 years, the big corporations are also laying off their employees for cost cutting. In such a scenario, it’s going to be very difficult to get a job for an individual.Â
India employment report 2024 is jointly published by International Labour Organisation(ILO) and Institute for Human Development (IHD).Â
ILO India employment report
1. Rising Unemployment: Indian youth is witnessing an unemployment crisis especially the ones who are educated meaning who have completed their graduation but still unable to get a job. Not all but few of them have somehow managed to get a job but the quality of employment is not up to the mark.Â
a.) Indian youth continue to fight with sky rocketing unemployment rates with nearly 83% of the jobless population belongs to the demographic of educated young Indians.
In 2022, the share of unemployed youths in in the total unemployed population was 82.9%. Also, the share of educated youths among all unemployed people increased to 65.7% in 2022 from 54.2% in 2000.
b.) The report further underscores a concerning trend where the proportion of educated young people, possessing at least secondary education, among the total unemployed youth has nearly doubled from 35.2% in 2000 to 65.7% in 2022.Â
c.) Dropout rates after secondary education remained high, particularly in poorer states and among marginalised communities. The root problem which should be addressed by the government is, despite increase in enrolment rate in higher education, quality of education persists as significant learning deficits observed across schools and higher education levels, as per the ILO report.Â
d.) Self employment(like a Kirana shop owner, street vendors, etc.) remains the primary source of employment-55.8% in 2022 whereas casual (job on contract basis) and regular employment (salaried person who has a fix job) accounted for 22.7% and 21.5%. The percentage of regular employment should be larger as it brings a sense of security of regular income.Â
2. Employment Quality:‘The employment condition index ‘ has improved between 2004-5 and 2021-22 but some states like Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and UP have remained at the bottom throughout this period while some states like Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Gujarat have stayed at the top.
Informal employment (without secure employment contract, social protection or benefits) has risen, around half of the jobs in the formal sector ( having benefits of health insurance, representation, secure contracts) are informal in nature. Almost 82% of the workforce are engaged in the informal sector and nearly 90% is informally employed.
3. Participation of women: The female labour force participation (LFPR) in India remains among the lowest in world. There is considerable gender gap as women’s LFPR (32.8%) in 2022 was 2.3 times lower than male’s LFPR (77.2%).
The LFPR of India is low due to low female LFPR which was much lower than world average of 47.3% in 2022 but higher than the South Asian average of 24.8%, as per the ILO data.
4. Occupational Transformation: There has been a reversal of the slow transition towards non-farm employment after 2018-19. It might happen due to the impact of COVID. The share of agriculture in total employment fell to around 42% in 2019 from 60% in 2000. This shift was largely absorbed by construction and services sectors which increased their share in total employment to 32% in 2019 from 23% in 2000.
But now the scenario is reversing again, the share of manufacturing in employment has remain stagnant at 12-14%. Since 2018-19, this slow transition has stagnated or reversed with the rise in the share of agricultural employment.
ILO suggestions for improvement
The report suggests five key policy areas for further action:
- Promoting Job creation
- Improve employment quality
- Address labour market inequalities
- Strengthening skills and active labour market policies
- Bridging the knowledge deficits on labour market patterns and youth employment.
The report also highlighted that rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) could have an impact on employment. In addition, the ILO report suggested that economic policies are required to boost productiove non-farm employment, especially in the manufacturing sector, with India likely to add 7-8 million youth annually to the labour force during the next decade.Â
More support needs to be provided to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, especially by providing tools such as digitalization and AI and a cluster-based approach manufacturing.
