Economy may have improved after twin shocks of demonetisation and Goods and Services Tax (GST) but jobs scenario is still grim. Layoffs, a recent survey finds, remain a commonplace despite the economic growth picking up.
This phenomenon could add weight to the argument that India is witnessing a jobless growth.
"Even as the economy improves, layoffs — due to cost cutting, reducing redundancies after a merger or acquisition, and restructuring events due to changes in the industry — remain commonplace," career transition company Risesmart said in its report after interviewing 1,000 executives.
The survey says that employees in the information technology sector experience more layoffs than those in other sectors. The IT sector is the first to face the impact of new technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence on jobs.
Even the Union labour ministry had conceded last year that the country was witnessing a jobless growth. "The current growth is a jobless growth. Many European and Asian countries, including India, are facing it...growth is being reported but it is not reflecting in employment generation," then labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya had said in May last year.
Last year, domestic rating agency Care Ratings said employment generation had not kept pace with GDP expansion. Aggregate employees in 1,473 companies grew to 5.18 million in FY17 from 5.01 million in FY15, a growth of a little over 1 percentage point per year compared to over nearly 7 per cent economic growth, it said.
The agency did a study of employment in the corporate sector for last five years and asked for the findings to be taken with caution because the unorganised sector and smaller businesses account for a large share in employment generation.
The government believes the jobs numbers are not reliable in the absence of comprehensive data. Now it plans to carry out a massive survey to map jobs across the country. Scheduled to start this month, the survey will track employment generation in micro, small and medium enterprises that are currently out of the coverage of the social security net. The survey will give special attention to enterprises with less than 10 employees, and it is likely to be completed within a year.
The government reckons that computing data for employment generation in the unorganised sector will significantly push the overall employment generation numbers in the country and help in countering the allegations of jobless growth. A recent report by Profëssor Pulak Ghosh of IIM Bangalore and Dr. Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economic adviser, SBI, debunked the theory of a jobless growth in India. They studied payroll data to conclude that 15 million jobs are being created every year.
As per the seventh quarterly employment survey, 1.36 lakh jobs were created in the July-October quarter last year across eight sectors, which account for 81% of the country’s total organised workforce. This was more than double the 64,000 jobs created in the preceding quarter and more than four times the 32,000 jobs created a year ago. However, the numbers are still well below the 10 million people that enter the country’s workforce every year.