This refers to the article, “Transforming India’s rural landscape” (January 10) by Sanju Verma. The need of the hour is to make a paradigm shift from city centric, capital intensive ‘Make in India’ to village centric, labour intensive ‘Make in Bharat’ to generate employment. We must protect labour intensive sectors, such as farming, unorganised retail, micro and small enterprises that contribute to current livelihoods in our country. But those sectors are not getting due priority and as a result, India has been losing 550 jobs per day for the last four years. According to recent Labour Bureau data, India created only 1.35 lakh jobs in 2015 in comparison to 4.19 lakh in 2013 and nine lakh in 2011. It shows that instead of growing, livelihoods are being lost in India on a daily basis.
India’s unemployment problem or jobless growth is indeed the main reason for the persistent poverty which obstructs the path between food and hunger. Thus, jobless growth leads to poverty, which in turn accounts for the colossal food wastage as its by-product. While 194.6 million people go to bed on an empty stomach everyday in our country, the value of food lost in India is nearly two-thirds of what it costs the Government to feed 600 million poor Indians. Why do our brothers and sisters starve in the midst of such a huge amount of food wastage? The answer is simple. Many Indians are unemployed or underemployed and they are indeed too poor to buy even minimum food. So, labour-intensive technology must be adopted to create a bridge between excess food and empty bellies. This will save farmers, boost market and rescue India from its abysmal 131st position in Human Development Index.