New job generation dropped in 2013: Assocham

Particular fall in Gujarat; IT and related sectors largest contributors

India's job market failed to expand in 20 of the 32 sectors tracked by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) in 2013.

The chamber's analysis - Job Scenario in 2013: A Review - painted a bleak picture for Gujarat's cities in new job generation with Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Gandhinagar witnessing a fall of between 6.5 per cent and 19 per cent in new job generation in 2013, compared to the previous year.

Assocham's analysis came on a day when the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi talked of waging a war against unemployment at the party's national council on Sunday.

Delhi and the adjoining National Capital Region (NCR), on the other hand, had a one-fourth share in jobs created in 2013. The analysis sourced data primarily from vacancies posted by about 4,500 companies via job portals such as timesjobs.com, naukri.com, monster.com and shine.com, among others, along with advertisements offering employment opportunities published in national and regional newspapers across 56 prominent cities. As such, it is not an exhaustive job data.

In all, jobs created in the sectors analysed dipped 0.4 per cent to 550,000 in 2013 compared with 552,000 in the previous year.

Information technology (IT) , information technology-enabled services and the IT hardware sector together accounted for 43 per cent of the total number of new jobs generated in 2013.

However, these sectors altogether recorded a one per cent drop in employment generation as the sectors created 236,000 new jobs in calendar year 2012 against 234,000 in 2013, the analysis showed.

The sectors showing an increase in jobs created in 2013 include the banking, financial services and insurance sector (15 per cent), academics (eight per cent), other manufacturing (3.6 per cent), telecom (3.4 per cent), automobile (3.2 per cent) and real estate, construction and engineering (7.1 per cent).

NCR saw 139,000 new jobs created in 2013.

Amid the top five metros, NCR and Bangalore clocked 12 per cent and four per cent year-on-year growth in job generation in 2013, respectively.

On the other hand, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai registered a drop of 21 per cent, two per cent and 22 per cent, respectively.

So far as performance of other tier-I cities are concerned, Hyderabad recorded a marginal increase of one per cent in job generation, while Ahmedabad saw a decline of 6.5 per cent.

In the tier-II category, the prominent cities that registered a surge in hiring activity during the year included Chandigarh (19 per cent), Kanpur (21 per cent), Ranchi (25 per cent), Raipur (25 per cent) and Vishakhapatnam (1.5 per cent).

Among this category, cities that recorded a drop included Bhopal (four per cent), Bhubaneswar (nine per cent), Coimbatore (31 per cent), Gandhinagar (seven per cent), Indore (10 per cent), Patna (21 per cent), Pune (5.4 per cent), Surat (nine per cent), Vadodra (19 per cent), and Vijayawada (six per cent).

Most of the tier-III centres registered an increase in new job generation. The list included Agra (18 per cent), Amritsar (14 per cent), Allahabad (48 per cent), Ajmer (84 per cent), Dehradun (40 per cent), Jalandhar (28 per cent), Jammu (39 per cent), Kota (29.5 per cent), Ludhiana (23 per cent), Meerut (24 per cent), Nagpur (86 per cent), Panaji (69 per cent), Patiala (116 per cent) and Udaipur (58 per cent).