Policy Watch: Growth with Employment – September 2021

This issue of Policy Watch cuts across several of the above themes and deals with the theme Growth with Employment.

The first article gives an overview of the employment situation in India in 2021. In it, Prof. Santosh Mehrotra, Visiting Faculty at the University of Bath, UK, highlights the fact that in 2017-18 the NSO reported that open unemployment had reached a 45-year high, and youth unemployment had tripled between 2011-12 and 2017-18 to over 18%. Finally, unemployment as per the Current Weekly Status, which is close to the international standard for measuring, was 8.9% in 2017-18 to 8.8% in 2018-19 and remained at 8.8% in 2019-20. These were the worst unemployment rates in the last 48 years since measurement began.

The second article is by RGICS Senior Fellow Dr. Rakesh Malhotra and Research Associate Narayani Gupta. It describes the results of an action research project that the RGICS has been doing to promote micro-enterprise based self-employment in small towns in 22 migration-prone districts of six states. It shows that by selecting individuals with a high level of achievement motivation coupled with handholding by local NGO Mentors, as many as 90 percent of the aspiring micro-entrepreneurs were able to establish and sustain a business activity, despite the lockdown and the second wave of COVID.

The third article is by RGICS Senior Advisor Manideep Ray and Research Associate Subho Chakroborty and it summarises a more detailed report they produced on the Health and Medical Equipment and Devices Sector for India. They conclude that it is a sunrise sector and thanks to the work done over the last ten years, India is poised to move from high import dependency to potentially becoming a global manufacturing hub for Health and Medical Equipment and Devices.

The fourth article, reproduced from the Economic Times, is by Supriyo De, Aditya Sinha, Chirag Dudani & Jayasimha K. R., who work with the Government of India, is a report card on what state labour law reforms have achieved so far. It concludes that states with greater flexibility in labour regulation have achieved higher employment growth.

The fifth article is by RGF Coordinator for Maharashtra, Moshsin Khan, who has reviewed the implementation of the Street Vendors Act 2014. He asserts that the law is not being seriously implemented and suggests the role of trade unions and civil society institutions in correcting the shortcomings.