Focus on real issue: Letter to BS on payroll reporting in India

With reference to “Job euphoria may be misplaced” (January 23), one feels the writer has come up with an erroneous analysis of the study Towards a payroll reporting in India (Ghosh and Ghosh). The writer raises several flags to discard the study, some of them are: overlap and duplication across various social sector schemes namely Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO), Employees’ State Insurance Scheme (ESIC), another is, new addition to EPFO wrongly interpreted as job creation. 

On careful analysis of the study, it comes to the fore that it has addressed the issues raised above. To weed out duplication of entries a 50 per cent haircut has already been made in EPFO and ESIC dataset, then also the conclusion of annual job creation of 7 million does not suffer much. Second, to address the issue of new EPFO account being equated to job creation, the study carefully selects 18-25 age group for their calculation and also points that the cluster is at the age of 22. So it is difficult to conclude that at the age of 22, a person might be into his second or third job hop. And moreover, the study does not take the analysis beyond the age of 25 years so this completely silences the critique of such an exercise. 

Undertaking such a study is no doubt a brave exercise. It should be given due credit for coming up with results which are difficult to question. But the discussion post the study has overshadowed the discourse whether 7 million jobs a year satiates the needs of the young job seekers because International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that India’s jobless rate is set to inch upward to 3.5 per cent in 2018 when it is falling worldwide. Conclusion is, even if it is 7 million a year, it is still below the break in level.

Durgesh Pawar  Greater Noida

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