PM must face the jobs debate head on
PremiumThe unemployed youth of this country are exercised over elusive jobs, and expect the elected leader of the nation to respond to their anxieties.
The Prime Minister is a powerful and savvy speaker. He put his abilities to good use while speaking in Parliament, replying to the debate on President’s address, attacking the Congress and enumerating the successes of his government. What he did not do was to respond to Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s broadside on the jobs crisis gripping India.
The PM is free to decide whom to respond to in Parliament. Ignoring Rahul Gandhi is one thing, but ignoring the jobs crisis is something else. The unemployed youth of this country are exercised over elusive jobs, and expect the elected leader of the nation to respond to their anxieties. The PM should have spoken about the jobs crisis in his own address to Parliament, but having omitted to do that, he should still speak on the subject from any platform or on any occasion of his choice.
There are certain puzzling aspects of the jobs crisis that the government should be in a position to throw light on. For example, there is a severe shortage of government personnel at different levels. Officers of the Indian Administrative Service are in short supply, causing the government at the Centre to consider commandeering officers serving in state governments for posts at the Centre. The Railways have huge numbers of vacancies. YSR Congress MP Vijayasai Reddy asked the government in Parliament to fill the eight lakh vacancies in the central government. Why do vacancies persist in the government, when the ranks of the educated unemployed swell? The government needs to come up with a convincing answer.
Former chief economic advisor to the government Arvind Subramanian has authored and co-authored academic papers and popular articles suggesting that the traditional route to prosperity via industrial jobs might no longer be feasible. Jobs in industry have been on the decline across the world, according to World Bank data. Even in industrial powerhouses such as China and South Korea, the share of workers in industry (including manufacturing, construction, mining and quarrying, electricity, water and gas) has been on the decline since 2012-13. For the world, share of industry in total employment has been trending down from a peak of 23.3% in 2012 to 22.7% in 2019. In China, industrial employment rose from 21.4% in 2002 to 30.3% in 2012 and declined thereafter, to reach 27.4% in 2019. Korea, with a more sophisticated manufacturing base, saw industrial employment decline from 36.8% in 1991 to 24.6% in 2019.
At the same time, the share of services in total employment has been growing. How does this reality square, from the perspective of jobs, with the government’s efforts to promote manufacturing with production-linked incentive schemes and extra doses of import protection? Countries cannot expect to have the self-same development trajectory, with only a time-shift to differentiate one country’s experience from another’s. Indian industry today has to compete with the industry from Korea and China, with their respective levels of capital intensity and technological sophistication, and with labour-intensive produce from lower income countries. Can we expect the Indian economy to produce as many industrial jobs as China and Korea had, during their early stages of industrial development? Don’t young people have the right to expect convincing explanations of its strategy from the government?
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In the 1950s, when India adopted central planning and opted to prioritize infrastructure, heavy industry and machine tools, instead of more labour-intensive sectors of the economy, it was based on an academic investigation of the medium-term implications for job creation and much public debate. For example, young Amartya Sen’s Choice of Techniques argued precisely for the strategy followed by the central planners on the ground that it stood to create more jobs down the line.
We do not expect the Prime Minister to spout learned theses on jobs in the House of the People. But we do expect him to engage in a serious debate on the subject, especially when the Opposition had initiated one.
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