Misery index
PremiumA sizeable chunk of our workforce has dropped out of the job race in despair. It affirms separate findings of our youth unable to find satisfactory jobs and a mass move back to farms
In the West, the rate of inflation plus that of joblessness is taken as an informal ‘misery index’ to indicate how hard-pressed most common folks are. The US, for example, is doing worse than India right now on retail price control, a true rarity. Its pace of economic growth is lower than ours, too. But the gap between the world’s two big democracies on people at work is not just visibly vast; we simply lack timely official data on this vital metric. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the past 30 days’ rolling average unemployment by its estimate of 24 April was 8.1%. Compared with the rupee’s erosion of purchasing power, this sort of misery afflicts fewer families but hits harder.
If a single-digit jobless figure seems not so worrisome, CMIE data also points to an elongated trend that must be reversed for that rate to better reflect reality. After all, India’s overall labour participation rate dropped from 46% to 40% between 2017 and 2022. A sizeable chunk of our workforce has dropped out of the job race in despair. It affirms separate findings of our youth unable to find satisfactory jobs and a mass move back to farms. Job generation needs far more policy attention than it gets.