Finding jobs: What surveys tell us about India’s biggest puzzle
more ‘optimistic’ about job creation than other sources, even those that use similar methodologies, and the criteria of who is employed or unemployed. The ILO estimates the labour force (the number of people employed or looking for jobs) grew by 99.2 million between 2000 and 2019. The workforce over the same period, or the number of people actually employed, grew at a slower rate—79.4 million people.
In contrast, the RBI KLEMS data estimates that over the same period, employment grew by 91.6 million, or 12.2 million more than the ILO estimate. Between 2012 and 2019, the discrepancy is even more stark. While the RBI estimates an increase in employment over this period of 21 million, the ILO puts it at only 0.2 million.
Other estimates have been even more pessimistic, estimating a fall in employment of 6 million to 15 million between 2011-12 and 2017-18. A paper by Paritosh Nath and Amit Basole of Azim Premji University, for instance, finds that total employment of persons over the age of 25 fell by 9.9 million over this period. In their study, the decline is driven almost entirely by a massive fall in female employment (over the age of 25) in rural areas.
Male employment actually increased by 12.4 million, across both rural and urban areas. “Employment growth has been weak in every demographic group (men, women, urban, rural) and has lagged far behind population growth. The result has been falling rates of labour force participation and rising rates of unemployment in every group.
Second, employment has not grown at all, and has in fact fallen for rural women," the authors conclude. Although discussed less alongside the jobs crisis, the previous decade has also seen a productivity crisis. On the face of it, this is
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