- NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Even if India’s major economy is still expanding at the quickest rate in the world, policy experts surveyed by Reuters said that the government’s largest issue over the next five years would be addressing the country’s chronic unemployment.
- The third-largest economy in Asia expanded by more than 8% in the previous fiscal year, mostly due to government capital expenditures that haven’t been able to generate enough corporate spending to generate enough jobs, especially for the youth in this 1.4 billion-person nation.
- In national elections that concluded in early June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party lost the legislative majority it had controlled for the previous ten years due to growing inequality, persistent inflation pressure, especially on food prices, and a dearth of well-paying employment.
- “We have a really strange issue in India: ostensibly extremely high aggregate growth rates without any rise in employment. Aspiring young employment and a better life were Modi’s campaign platform when he came to office, but things have become far worse since then, according to Jayati Ghosh, a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- “You must have a plan tailored to your particular profession… The public sector has to hire many more people to provide fundamental social services, health, education, nutrition, and sanitation.”
- “Whatever best can be done is being done” is the BJP’s response to the admission that employment had a role in the election.
- However, the majority of economists doubted the government’s capacity to create employment or effectively assess its success or failure. Others emphasized that business must play a significant role in bringing about meaningful changes to employment.
- “The employment needed to accommodate the millions of people who join the workforce each year cannot conceivably be created by the government on its own. Rajeswari Sengupta, an associate professor of economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai, said that to address this, the private sector must step up with significant, ongoing investment.
OFFICIAL AREA
- The BJP administration has dramatically increased infrastructure investment in the last 10 years, but corporate spending has not kept pace with the increase in volume and intensity.
- Often considered as a gauge for private investment, gross fixed capital formation has increased since 2014 at a compound annual growth rate of around 8%, down from 14% over the preceding 10 years.
- “The government needs to identify impediments to private investment, remove policy hurdles and obstacles holding back a revival … and let the private sector do its job with minimum government hindrance,” Sengupta said.
- When asked what the government could do to support job creation, a large number of poll participants said that encouraging private investment was essential.
- Increasing collaboration between the federal and state governments, improving education standards, and changing tax laws were among the other suggestions.
- The lack of a generally acknowledged unemployment rate in India poses a significant obstacle to the country’s efforts to create jobs, in part because it is very difficult to quantify in a nation where almost 1 billion individuals are eligible for employment. In the absence of a widely accepted beginning point, success is hard to gauge.
- Approximately 80% of Indian workers are employed in the unregulated sector, according to a recent report from the Reserve Bank of India.
- According to Bina Agarwal, a professor of development economics and environment at the University of Manchester, “official figures of unemployment don’t capture the absence of jobs in the informal sector, and since most of India’s workforce is in the informal sector, especially rural, you’re not going to be recording them as unemployed.”
- According to the most recent official statistics, the unemployment rate for the fiscal year 2022–2023 is just 3.2%, which is much lower than the already historically low unemployment rate in the US. However, the private think tank Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy estimated 7.0% unemployment in May, compared to around 6% before the outbreak.
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