A significant percentage of India’s poor are, in fact, employed even though they might not have regular jobs. With unemployment turning out to be a big challenge for the government currently, and rural areas in distress due to agriculture’s all-time-low economic returns, India has started debating employment seriously.

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Jobless growth: In a jobless growth economy, unemployment remains stubbornly high even as the economy grows. This tends to happen when a relatively large number of people have lost their jobs, and the ensuing recovery is insufficient to absorb the unemployed, under-employed, and those first entering the workforce.

Jobless growth and poverty:

• Problem is, our discussions usually centre around two solutions: create jobs through government spending on infrastructure and take up skill development that would offer some employability to the youth. Add to it the disproportionate focus on economic growth leading to job creation. These strategies are age-old, and are not in sync with job market characteristics. We have a high youth unemployment rate, and those who are employed are not able to lead a decent life.
• 39 per cent of young workers in emerging and developing countries live in moderate and or extreme poverty. This means surviving on less than US $3.10/day. Worse, in emerging and developing countries, 16.7 per cent of young workers live on income below the extreme poverty threshold of US $1.90/day. (Global Employment Trends for Youth 2018 by the International Labour Organization (ILO)).
• In developing countries, 95 per cent of employed youth are in informal sectors. In another discouraging trend, the ILO report says that youths are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. “Globally, the ratio of youth to adult unemployment rates has changed very little in recent years, serving to illustrate the particularly disadvantaged situation of young people in the labour market.”
• According to the Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey, 2015-16, with an increase in education levels across India, the unemployment rate has also risen in the age group of 18-29 years.
• India’s employment is found primarily in informal sectors; a substantial percentage of it comes from daily wages in development projects and agriculture.
• Their earnings are uncertain, and with very little wealth to fall back on, they easily slip back into poverty. This is the plight of small farmers, small entrepreneurs and workers in the informal sector of India.

Measures needed:

• The most important is provision of universal social security. In a dynamic, market-based economy, in which enterprises will wax and wane and jobs will be insecure, citizens must have adequate social security to provide for various emergent requirements, especially breaks in income, health emergencies, and old-age pensions.
• The political economy must be reformed with stronger associations at the bottom, such as collectives of small producers and unions of workers.
• Collectives can provide resources that individual enterprises cannot afford, and associations and unions can give more bargaining power to people at the bottom to improve the terms of trade in their favour—the prices they get, and the wages they are paid.
• Laws applying to small enterprises must be simplified and their implementation made easier. The burden of complicated and badly administered regulations is highest for small enterprises.
• Labour laws and regulations are necessary, and their content improved and implementation eased. They must be reformed for faster and more inclusive growth.
• Small enterprises provide more employment than large ones and will continue to provide most jobs and incomes in the economy.
• Access to finance, access to markets, access to technology, fair prices, and reduction of harassment from authorities are their principal problems. They must be tackled.

Conclusion:

Informal employment shouldn’t be equated with non-job status. Rather, the strategy should be to maximise decent job creation in these sectors. When we talk about skill development, we usually don’t consider the skills being employed in informal sectors by workers as legitimate skills. Instead, we tend to force them into a new set of skills that they have to start with afresh. This might lengthen the process of job creation and employment. To sum up, we need to think anew about the way we create jobs.