Dreaming of a thriving economy through self-employment
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: October 16, 2023 -

Addressing the students at the occasion of 2nd Kaushal Deekshant Samaroh, the annual skill convocation ceremony of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship on October 12, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the employment creation in India has reached a new height with the unemployment rate in the country recorded at its lowest level in the last six years.

Claiming that new possibilities are being created for the youth as India's economy is expanding, the Prime Minister also expressed happiness over the unemployment rate declining rapidly in both rural and urban areas and said it is testimony of the benefits of developmental initiatives taken up by his government reaching both the villages and cities equally.

The Prime Minister was obviously referring to the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report for 2022-23 released by the National Statistical Office (NSO) three days earlier in trumpeting the success of his government in creating jobs.

The latest PLFS report has shown that the unemployment rate in usual status (a person's employment status based on the reference period of 365 days preceding the survey date) for people aged 15 years and above at the all-India level decreased to 3.2 percent in the July-June 2022-23 period from 4.1 percent in the same period the previous year (2021-2022).

The unemployment rate was 4.2 per cent in 2020-21, 4.8 per cent in 2019-20, 5.8 per cent in 2018-19, and 6 per cent in 2017-18.

So, the unemployment rate coming down for the 5th consecutive years to an all-lndia level low at 3.2 percent from 6 percent recorded in 2017-18 indeed is no mean achievement for anyone to belittle of, especially for a country which is trying hard to rebound its economy after the devastating impact of Covid pandemic.

However, a closer scrutiny of the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report has revealed that even though the unemployment rate for the youth in the age group 15-29 years eased to 10 per cent in 2022-23 from 12.4 per cent in 2021-22, around 24 states/UTs including Lakshadweep, Kerala, Ladakh, Goa, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Manipur recorded a higher-than-national average rate.

There is also a sharp divergence in the unemployment rates across the country with only a dozen states/UTs including Gujarat, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Chandigarh, Jharkhand and Karnataka recording a single-digit growth youth unemployment while the remaining 24 states/UTs registering a double-digit growth rate, higher than the national average of 10 per cent.

Moreover, the latest PLFS report may have indicated a decline in unemployment rates in both rural and urban areas during the 2022-23 period to 2.4 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, from 3.2 per cent and 6.3 per cent in the 2021-22 period, but the unemployment rate for rural women recording lower at 1.8 per cent than that for rural men (2.7 per cent) in 2022-23 has only reaffirmed the ages-old symptom of economic distress in rural area of the country.

Last but not the least, the report of PLFS has shown rising share of self-employment in the overall labour force of the country from 55.6 per cent recorded in 2020-21 to 57-3 per cent in 2022-23, which is again not a good sign for a country which is striving to become the third largest economy in the world by 2028 by overtaking Japan and Germany.

Many experts have attributed the rise in self-employment among most workers in India to lack of alternatives in the country where the share of salaried class has fallen from 21.1 per cent 2020-21 to 20.9 per cent in 2022-23.

Is this the promise of an economy that would grow fast enough to create jobs for millions of young Indians that the Modi Government made to sweep power in 2014? Only God knows.