Young urban people are being hit hardest, a Bengaluru-based private university said in a report
WEB DESK / NEW DELHI
At least 5 million (50 lakh) people lost opportunities to work across the country, while the overall unemployment rate doubled between 2011 and 2018 to 6%, says a ‘State of Working India’ (SWI) report published by Centre for Sustainable Employment (CSE) of Azim Premji University (APU).
Researchers from the university used unit-level data from the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), which covers around 5.22 lakh individuals quarterly, to get an outline of unemployment and what could be done to address it.
“In addition to rising open unemployment among the higher educated, the less educated (and likely informal) workers have also seen job losses and reduced work opportunities since 2016,” said Amit Basole, an economist and lead author of the report
The rural Workforce Participation Rate (that is, the percentage of people working against the population within the working age) among men dipped from close to 72% in Jan-April 201 (a few months before demonetisation) to slightly above 68% by Dec.2018. The corresponding figure for urban men reduced from 68% to nearly 65% in this time.“The numbers seem to suggest we are in a perfect storm-like situation.
On the supply side, there is rising aspirations, youth bulge, higher levels of general educational degrees. On the demand side, there has been a collapse of public sector employment, the weak link between growth in private industry and employment, and factors such as demonetisation and GST,” Amit Basole, lead author of the report, said at its release. “It seems like employment opportunities have been hit by demonetisation and has not recovered after that,” he observed.
The report shows that the worst-hit in terms of lost employment opportunities were those in rural areas with pre-university or graduate certification and those between the ages of 20 and 24 years.SWI relied primarily on the date from CMIE rather than Centre’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), whose last report was in 2011-12. While a report on 2017-18 had been prepared, it ran into controversy as the Centre refused to release it. Leaked versions of the report pointed to soaring unemployment rates — reportedly highest in 45 years.
PC Mohanan, who resigned from National Statistical Commission in protest against Centre’s decision not to release the report, said there was much insight in 2017-18 report, which had been carefully drafted totally with previous 5-yearly PLFS reports.