The National Democratic Alliance government may need to go back to the basics in order to revive the job market from the doldrums. Textiles, the second most labour intensive sector of the Indian economy after agriculture, is trying to rescue the shrinking job structure in the country and the government is expecting to create one crore jobs from the special package for textiles and apparels introduced in June 2016.
The government had infused Rs 6,000 crore for three years under the special package aimed at boosting exports, attracting investments and creating employment opportunities. The package is designed to create one crore jobs in three years and boost exports by $30 billion and investments by Rs 74,000 crores in three years. “Under the Pradhan Mantri Paridhan Rojgar Protsahan Yojana, over 140,000 job seekers have been already registered for direct jobs in our sector. As per the estimates, these direct jobs will create about 300,000 indirect jobs,” said Smriti Irani, Union textile minister at a press conference to announce the achievements in last three years.
The electoral promise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to create one crore new jobs every year still remains undelivered. Despite three years after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power after a landslide victory, the job sector is still at an eight-year low.
As per the official data from labour ministry, only 155,000 jobs were created in 2015 and 231,000 lakh in 2016 — the lowest since the 10 lakh jobs created by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2009.
A research by CRISIL, a rating agency, showed that in the last three years, sectors with a substantive share in employment — agriculture, construction and manufacturing — have been lagging overall GDP growth due to which experts have labelled India’s economic growth as ‘jobless’.
To put the numbers into perspective, India has the largest number of young population in the world. India adds nearly one crore new workers into the existing workforce annually, roughly equivalent to the total population of Czech Republic or Portugal. And we are not even creating half of what is required, hence the number of workers seeking jobs far outstrips supply of jobs. Crisply, we have created just 2.31 per cent of the total jobs required.
While most of the jobs were created in manufacturing and education, sectors such as construction, hotels and restaurants witnessed job cuts instead of job creation, as per the official data.
