Despite all the big talks of skill development and alternative employment the job creation remains at the lowest ebb of the Central government. And it looks government has no policy to even address the malady. Macro-economic parameters too are not showing any hope. The number of people who apply for work in the job guarantee scheme is a good measure of the employment situation in rural areas. Till the third week of March this year a staggering 8.4 crore persons had demanded work under MGNREGS. That’s a 15 per cent increase from the 7.3 crore who demanded work last year. This is a symptom of large scale scarcity of jobs because the wage employment scheme provided only 43 days of work on average in a whole year – instead of the 100 days guaranteed under the scheme -and that too manual labour. Another partial measure of recent employment trends is provided by a quarterly survey of eight industries by the Labour Bureau. After the NDA government took over, just 4.3 lakh jobs have been added between July 2014 and October 2015 – lower than the immediately preceding 15 months and the same as the corresponding period of 2012-13 under UPA. Of these, the bulk of jobs have been in IT-enabled services (ITES) and the BPO sector. Besides these two indicators, some of the big economic indicators too are not presenting a very optimistic picture. The index of industrial production (IIP) measures how industrial production is changing – if it rises, so does employment, and if it slows, creation of jobs is affected. Between April 2015 and January 2016, the IIP grew by just 2.7 per cent. In the first year of the BJP-led government, it had grown by 2.6 per cent. A forward looking strategy on job creation could incorporate certain elements, though they need not be limited to them. Private sector participation can be encouraged, for instance. The time is now ripe to actively engage the private sector to share this burden, which must be henceforth viewed as an opportunity.
