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  • 29/11/2004

The employment whitewash
Jobs are what all Indians want. Governments know this. But they do not know how to create jobs. The problem is that the much-touted mantra of economic growth does not generate jobs. In fact, the reverse is quite true: India suffers from the growth-without-jobs syndrome.

Therefore in the last decade (between 1993-94 and 1999-2000), even as the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate increased, the growth in jobs declined. The employment growth fell to 1.07 per cent per annum between 1994 and 2000, from 2.7 per cent between 1983 and 1993. This, when the GDP growth accelerated to 6.7 per cent from 5.3 per cent. “The capacity of job creation per unit of GDP output has gone down by about three times compared to that in the 1980s and early 1990s,” says S P Gupta, a former member of the Planning Commission who headed a special group on employment generation set up by the last National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government.

The NDA spent its five-year tenure on the job-drawing board. In 1999, it set up the ‘Task Force on Employment Opportunities’ under Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who ironically is the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission now. The Ahluwalia task force, which was charged with suggesting strategies for providing employment to 100 million in 10 years, or 10 million jobs each year, submitted its report in July 2001.

But even before this report was submitted, the NDA government formed yet another task force: the ‘Special Group on Targeting Ten Million Employment Opportunities Per Year.’ Gupta headed this group, which submitted its report in May 2002. For the next two years, the two reports did rounds of various ministries; there was very little action besides that. In December 2002, in another ambitious document called India Vision 2020 the government reiterated its commitment to create 10 million jobs a year over the next two decades. This document with its grand promises ultimately took shape as the now infamous ‘India Shining’ campaign of the NDA government just before the general elections in May 2004.

The current United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has picked up the 10 million jobs mantra. It is expected to enact a national rural employment guarantee act ensuring 100 days of employment to one person from each household across rural India. But as the debate over the employment guarantee increasingly focuses on the cost to the exchequer, the government is expected to start with 150 districts and officials hint that another task force may be set up on how to ‘arrange’ jobs under the guarantee scheme.

But how unemployed is India?
In a country as diverse, disparate and disorganised as India, it would be impossible to accurately measure the exact number of the unemployed. For instance, it is clear that people ‘find’ employment for some periods of the year and it is also clear not all people are employed for all days in the year. So, the measure of unemployment has to gauge who will be regarded as employed in terms of the days they worked during a year and the intensity in terms of the hours they worked. Then, there is the issue of ‘quality’ of employment: so even if people are employed, is the work they do adequate to meet their basic needs?

The census, for instance, only classifies people as employed or unemployed. But the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) collects and analyses information based on different criteria to determine the rate of unemployment (see box: Who is an unemployed?) and is considered to be the best assessment. The state employment exchanges

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