Despite all the big talks by the Central leadership the grim reality today is that job creation has remained at very low ebb. And it looks government has no policy to even address the malady. This was evident in the recently presented budget in the Parliament, there was no reference to the issue. 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 MGNREGA. 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. The last such survey result was released in March 2016 covering June to October of 2015. 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 previous year, the first year of this government, it had grown by 2.6 per cent. The bottom-line is that jobs remain elusive and measures to create jobs are still to show results.
