A World Bank study, released about a fortnight ago, estimated that there will be 850,000 new entrants a month in India’s job market for the next two decades. The country’s track record has been 500,000 jobs a month between 2000 and 2010.
So getting that many additional jobs is a big problem going forward. But that is still a smaller issue to tackle than the quality of those jobs despite the fact that real wages have increased for wage workers and poverty has declined for the self-employed and casual workers in the last decade.
The problem is that casual labourers, who are paid on a daily, irregular or piece-rate basis, account for a third of the employed. But the proportion of regular wage and salaried earners, who receive a regular salary from a job in the public or private sector and usually earn leave and supplementary benefits, have remained largely unchanged at a sixth over the last 10 years. And the self-employed, many of whom are in farming, still make up half of the employed despite the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.
Therein lies the rub. According to Teamlease Chairman Manish Sabharwal, agricultural productivity is dismal — 75 million Indians produced 110 million tonnes of milk, while 100,000 Americans produced 70 million tonnes of milk. India, he adds, will not put poverty in the museum to which it belongs till it gets farm employment down to 15 per cent of the labour force. In 1900, 41 per cent of Americans worked on farms. Today, there are less the figure is less than two per cent. China has moved 400 million people into non-farm jobs since Mao died.
Over the next 20 years, Sabharwal says, effectiveness in four labour market transitions – rural to urban, unorganised to organised, subsistence self-employment to decent wage employment and farm to non-farm – could save 163 million Indians from poverty.
Among many other things, the experience of developed economies shows this can happen only if there is a focus on (a) better nutrition in early childhood and (b) improving the quality of education to equip workers with relevant skills since demand for skilled workers is increasing — indicated by the rising wage premiums for higher levels of education.
Let’s first look at the problem of poor nutrition in early childhood — an aspect in which South Asia has the weakest indicators in the world, even lower than Sub-Saharan Africa. On this account, India may have fared much better than some of its neighbours but the experience on the ground has been still quite dismal. For example, consider a report by Child Rights and You (CRY) released on Tuesday. The CRY survey showed how a majority of schools run by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) provide “khichdi” without salt, containing sand and small pebbles.
Nitin Wadhwani, a volunteer with CRY, said an application under Right to Information showed that even milk was stopped in schools after reports of food poisoning. “Though the government resolution shows that children should be given fruit, groundnuts, soya biscuits and other nutritious items, in reality, none of this is provided,” he said.
If this is happening in the country’s commercial capital, it’s easy to imagine what’s going on in the lesser developed parts.
The second major point of concern is improving the quality of education to increase employability. In fact, the country is going to face the paradox of having one of the world’s largest number of people join the workforce but most of them will lack requisite skills and the mindset for productive employment. India has about 550 million people under the age of 25 years out of which only 11 per cent are enrolled in tertiary institutions compared to the world average of 23 per cent.
The result is obvious. Here is the experience of a company that had a hard time hiring programming developers for its India office. “I feel sad to see so many so-called ‘developers’ responding to our job posts, but in reality most of them do not even know the basic foundations of software development,” the company said.
“During the countless interviews we have conducted, I realised that most developers here are simply focusing their energies on how to finish their work, even if they seriously ‘botch’ the code with hack jobs. While interviewing them, we were shocked to know that even developers with more that five years of experience did not know the fundamentals of design patterns, structured coding, and so on. Some of them even had the audacity to tell the interviewer that all these are advanced things, these do not matter,” the company says.
Gouri Gupta, who leads strategy at the National Skill Development Council, estimates that India needs at least 526 million skilled labour by 2022. Going by the experience of the company mentioned above, that’s a real long distance to cover.
