India – Labour-intensive jobs need to grow

Growth for employment creation needs to be given priority over everything else. The number of voters has gone up by a hundred million between 2009 and 2014. In other words, something like 20 million people are entering the job market each year. Add to that the need to move employment from the agricultural to the non-agricultural sector to reduce the sizeable gap between the per capita incomes of the two.

Unless employment is created on a much higher scale than in the last decade, the problem has the potential to threaten social stability which is, if anything, even more important than financial stability. Growth revival is a necessary condition for employment creation, but it is clearly not a sufficient condition. The key is rapid growth in labour-intensive manufacturing, a point I would come back to.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Labour-intensive jobs need to grow – Livemint.

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