Pattern of employment -- whether the workforce is engaged in self-employed occuption or work for others-- changed significantly in industry and services during the first decade of this century.
More people as a portion of the workforce in the non-agriculture sector took to working for others in the decade compared to the start of the century, an official data showed.
Between 1999-2000 and 2009-10, the self-employed workforce in the non-agriculture sector, mainly a part of the unorganized sector, declined 9.25 per cent as a propotion of the total workforce. A year is taken from start of July to end of June.
It should be noted here that a hawker is also as much self-employed as a highly sucessful doctor working for his own business. But the data largely included unorganised sector because of abundance of labour there.
While proportion of males saw a 5.6 per cent decline in the self-employed non-agri workforce, females saw a 22.7 per cent decline.
The largest decline in portion of the self-employed workforce was among the rural females. Their numbers fell 28.6 per cent from 622 per 1000 female workforce in 1999-00 to 436 female in 2009-10, according to the 66th round of the employment and unemployment survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO).
This could be attributed to the increased rural-urban migration during the decade. As the males who were earlier working on fields, found jobs in the urban areas and migrated, females of the family took to the fields, said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist CARE Ratings.
Rural areas saw a 15 per cent decline in portion of the self employed non-agri workforce compared to just 3.18 per cent in the urban areas, which is well explained by the rural-urban migration theory.
Size of services sector expanded during the decade due to the IT sector boom, whereas women in rural areas took to agriculture, economists said.
Not just rural areas, in urban areas as well, portion of the self-employed female workforce declined 10.93 per cent to 391 per 1000 female workers from 439 over the decade.
S R Hashim, former member of the Planning Commission, said that this could be attributed to the rise in the income levels during the decade. “As the incomes of the males increased, females exited the workforce”, he said.
He also added that it may be difficult to compare the two data as different questions were asked in the two surveys.
Portion of the male self-employed declined by 10.06 per cent in the rural areas and by just 1.2 per cent in the urban areas.
In the rural areas, among the workers in the agriculture related activities (excluding only growing of crop) , nearly 71.3 per cent of the male workers and 93.1 per cent of the female workers were self-employed in 2009-00. In the non-agricultural sector, nearly 41.1 per cent of the male worker and 43.6 per cent of the female workers were self-employed.
About 44.4 per cent of the self-employed workers, worked from home in the rural areas in 2009-00, whereas 30.7 per cent worked from home in the urban areas.
Economists said this had more to do with the difference in the type of activities in rural and urban areas.
Rural areas have more of agriculture and other vocational activities, and not enough infrastructure, they explained.
Goa and West Bengal saw the highest percentage of the self-employed women working from home at 85.2 per cent and 80.1 per cent during 2009-00respectively.
Among rural males, Mizoram and Gujarat saw the highest number of the self-employed males working from home at 56.8 per cent and 40.5 per cent respectively.
On an all-India basis, 21.3 per cent of the self employed worked from home.
The 66th round of National Sample Survey was conducted over 7,402 villages and 5,252 urban blocks covering 1,00,957 households (59,129 in rural areas and 41,828 in urban areas) and 4,59,784 persons (2,81,327 in rural areas and 1,78,457 in urban areas).
