Overview: Taking Stock
7
funding should be adequate to support the
initial period of five to eight years, depend-
ing on location and characteristics of mem-
bers. A review of the support mechanisms
and funding arrangements is necessary.
Wage employment
As indicated earlier, the services sector has
expanded exponentially. The new economy
jobs in communication, health, education,
information technology (IT) and logistics
have opened up several avenues. Start-
ups, small enterprises, own account self-
employed services and wage employment
have been vigorously increasing in mobile-
based services, financial services, television
and media-related services, as also courier
and logistics. The e-commerce revolu-
tion is making a number of career options
possible and thus generates livelihoods of
a different nature. Some of these jobs do
not require very high levels of skills but
adequate training to develop a raw person
into a semi-skilled one. Preparing the work
force for the new economy’s jobs is a criti-
cal requirement. The need for incremental
people to be employed in security services,
courier services, mobile-related services,
cable TV-related services is projected to be
very high. Some of these require minimum
technical skills. In others, right aptitude is
required. Identifying people for these sectors
and building their capacities is a challenge.
In a separate chapter on skills development,
some of the issues in building skills are
covered in greater detail. The initiative to
upgrade the skills of a large number of peo-
ple in the country is thus a very timely and
appropriate one. We must ensure that the
funds allocated and the efforts taken are well
spent and result in meaningful livelihoods.
A cause for concern is that new liveli-
hoods, especially in the form of jobs, are
not created at a rate adequate to meet the
increasing supply of labour force. The
Economic Survey 2015
points out:
Regardless of which data source is used, it
seems clear that employment growth is lag-
ging behind growth in the labour force. For
example, according to the Census, between
2001 and 2011, labour force growth was 2.23
per cent (male and female combined). This
is lower than most estimates of employment
growth in this decade of closer to 1.4 per cent.
Creatingmore rapid employment opportuni-
ties is clearly a major policy challenge.
The phenomenon of jobless growth is
heard of more frequently now than in the
past. Economic growth in terms of GDP
does not translate into jobs. The declining
employment elasticity over the years in India
(Table 1.2) has been attributed to increasing
labour productivity, shifting of labour from
low productivity sectors to high productiv-
ity sectors and investment decisions that
focus on non-labour intensive sectors. The
Planning Commission task force for the
12th five year plan projected an employment
elasticity of 0.31 in the best case and 0.24 in
the worst case scenarios and came up with
projections ranging from 59 to 28 million
new jobs over the period 2012 to 2017,
depending on the varying GDP growth and
factor productivity assumptions. The task
force highlighted some basic issues in the
light of changes taking place in the structure,
location and nature of employment. The
first of these is the migration taking place
from agriculture to non-agriculture work
and from rural to urban areas as these jobs
carry better wages. This is a transformative
change but whether the new jobs that replace
the old ones are ‘decent work’ is an issue
to be dealt with. Employment security and
income security issues have to be addressed
for the migrant people. The second issue is
that of transition of labour from informal
jobs in unorganised sectors to informal
jobs in organised sectors. This is a welcome
change as it improves the quality of employ-
ment and usually based on a contract that
is enforceable. The third type of change is
the shift from unorganised sector jobs or
informal jobs to formal, organised sector
jobs. This is the best possible outcome but
given the profile of employment in different
sectors, this is likely to happen to a small
percentage of labour force.
