What unemployment? Centre says jobs on the rise

A majority of Opposition parties, public intellectuals and economists alike may be fuming at the Centre for pushing India towards unprecedented unemployment rates. Yet, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, it would appear, is steadfast in its denial of the growing crisis of joblessness that has engulfed the country in recent years.

On Monday, as Parliament convened for the first day of its monsoon session, several MPs in the Lok Sabha sought the government’s response on unemployment issues, declining labour participation ratio (LPR) and job losses in organised and unorganised sectors, particularly in the COVID pandemic years.

In its written response to various queries, the Centre not only denied the existing crises of unemployment and the unprecedented fall in LPR but, in fact, claimed that the Modi regime’s policy initiatives had boosted job creation and that the number of Indians joining the workforce has been rising steadily.

Alarming levels

Trinamool Congress MP Deepak Adhikari ‘Dev’ and Shiv Sena MPs Krupal Tumane and Pawan Rajenimbalkar had asked the government whether it is aware that “more than 1.5 million people have lost their jobs during the last two or three months in organised and unorganised sectors due to which the rate of unemployment in rural and urban India has increased”.

Noting that the “rate of unemployment has reached alarming levels in the country”, the three MPs had asked the Centre to provide India’s unemployment data for the past three years.

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In a written reply submitted before the Lok Sabha, Union minister of state for labour and employment, Rameshwar Teli, laid out data from the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation’s annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report and the year-wise estimated Worker Population Ratio (WPR), and Unemployment Rate (UR) to claim India’s “unemployment rate has declined whereas the worker population ratio has increased during the year 2020-21 as compared to previous years”.

Teli claimed that while the official data pegged India’s WPR at 47.3 per cent in 2018-19, the corresponding data for the following two years saw a steady rise; touching 50.9 per cent in 2019-20 and rising further to 52.6 per cent in 2020-21. Additionally, the MoS said, India’s unemployment rate for 2020-21 stood at just 4.2 per cent; an improvement over the 4.8 per cent UR recorded the previous year and 5.8 per cent clocked in 2018-2019.

Employment schemes

The Centre’s reply also stressed that its policy initiatives and schemes such as the Aatmanirbhar Bharat (announced by Modi last year to provide stimulus to business and to mitigate the adverse impact of the COVID pandemic) and the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Rojgar Yojana (ABRY) for long-term schemes of employment generation had benefitted “59.53 lakh beneficiaries through 1.50 lakh establishments” as on July 10, 2022.

Teli’s reply to the three MPs gave beneficiary data from different employment generation schemes for the current financial year. However, the minister skipped responding to the moot question asked by the lawmakers: have millions of Indians lost jobs across the organised and unorganised sectors in recent months?

Significantly, even the official data provided by the MoS for Labour and Employment appears to be hugely at variance with common public perception and surveys and studies done by private institutions. Just earlier this month, the Mumbai-based private research firm, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), had raised yet another alarm over growing joblessness in India. The CMIE, which publishes employment-related data every month, has claimed that India’s current unemployment rate was nearing 9 per cent as against the nearly 5 per cent recorded five years ago.

CMIE data point to grim image

Even though the CMIE claims that the employment scenario over the past few months is marginally better than the previous year, when job losses across sectors amid a raging COVID pandemic had become common, its recent data too paints a far grim image of India’s unemployment crisis than what the Modi government presents.

As per the last CMIE report, published just a few days ago, the unemployment rate on a 30-day moving average stood at 7.5 per cent against the 7.8 per cent it had estimated in June. It was also during this period that India’s employment rate had fallen to a two-year low of 35.8 per cent.

The steep fall in India’s employment rate had been raised by Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi, through an unstarred question, on Monday. Gogoi had asked the Ministry of labour and employment “whether the government is aware that Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is 40.38 per cent” and if it had “studied possible reasons for the historic low LFPR”.

In his written reply, Teli contradicted Gogoi’s claim and, instead, asserted that to the PLFS Report, the estimated LFPR “on usual status for persons of age 15 years and above was 49.8 per cent, 50.2 per cent, 53.5 per cent and 54.9 per cent during 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21, respectively”. The minister added, “data shows that LFPR has an increasing trend”.

Also read: Over 45 crore Indians are not even looking for jobs: CMIE data

The minister’s insistence on rising employment in the country comes at a time when the general consensus among researchers and analysts has been that India’s job crisis has been worsening and that, as of last month, the number of employed people in the country had fallen sharply to 390 million as against 404 million in May.

LFPR at all-time low

The CMIE also claims that LFPR, which is not just an indicator of people employed but also those looking to be employed, had reached an all-time low of 40 per cent as against the already poor rate of 46 per cent registered six years ago.

Gogoi says the government is simply employing chicanery with data to present an ‘all is well’ image of India’s employment scenario “when in reality, we are going through not just the worst phase of job crisis ever but doing so at a time when the Centre’s flawed economic policies have wreaked havoc and caused unprecedented inflation”.