Unemployment

Women Are Bearing the Brunt of India’s Unemployment Problem

This piece is an extension of a piece on unemployment I wrote sometime back. Nevertheless, you don’t have to read that piece in order to make sense of this.

Honestly, this is probably the most disturbing data driven piece that I have ever written, despite the fact that I started writing on the issue of unemployment more than half a decade back, when it wasn’t very fashionable to do so.

The brunt of India’s unemployment problem is being borne by women. This is not to say that the men are having an easy time. They aren’t, given that many more men enter the labour force than women.

Nevertheless, the proportion of women who are employed and get paid was low to start with, and it has become even lower over the years. This, at a time, when more and more women are going to school and college.

As the All India Survey of Higher Education for 2018-19 points out: “Total enrolment in higher education has been estimated to be 3.74 crore with 1.92 crore male and 1.82 crore female. Females constitute 48.6% of the total enrolment.” But all this education isn’t helping them find paid employment.

Let’s start with the unemployment rate for men and women. The following chart plots this data since January 2016.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

The above chart tells us several interesting things.

1) The unemployment rate for women is significantly higher than that of men. In February 2021, the unemployment for women stood at 12.39% whereas for men it stood at 6.23%.

2) The unemployment rate for women in February 2021 is much lower than it was in January 2016, when Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) published the unemployment data for the first time. Have things improved? Keep reading to know the answer.

3) The peak unemployment rate for women during covid was 29.22% as of April 2020. The rate has fallen since to 12.39%, as of February 2021. Again, have things improved?

In order to answer the questions raised above, we need to understand how unemployment is defined. (For those who have read the earlier piece I wrote on unemployment, the next few paragraphs may seem like a repetition, which they are. I have repeated these paragraphs, simply because it is important for every piece to stand on its own, so that first time readers can also read and understand it easily).

A person is categorised as unemployed “because of a lack of job and where such a person is actively looking for a job”. The word to mark here is actively. Hence, a person can be categorised as unemployed only if he doesn’t have a job and is searching for one.

As the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) puts it, a person categorised as unemployed, “should be unemployed on the date of the survey, should be actively looking for a job in the 100 hundred days (approximately three months) preceding the date of the survey and should be willing to take up the job if a job is found.”

They further point out: “A person is considered to be actively looking for a job if such a person has contacted potential employers for jobs, contacted employment agencies, placement agencies, appeared for job interviews, responded to job advertisements, online employment sites, made applications, submitted resumes to potential employers or reached out to family members, friends, teachers to look for jobs from them.”

To put it in short, waiting for a job offer to come, is not considered as actively looking for a job.

Let’s move on and plot the next two charts, the labour participation rate for men and women.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

Before we interpret these charts, we first need to define what labour participation rate is. Labour participation rate is the ratio of the labour force to the population greater than 15 years of age. And what is the labour force? As per CMIE, labour force consists of persons who are of 15 years of age or more, and are employed, or are unemployed and are actively looking for a job.

Now we are in a position to interpret the above two charts. Let’s do that pointwise.

1) The labour participation rate for women is miniscule on the whole. In February 2021, it stood at 9.42%. What does this mean? It means that a very small proportion of women over the age of 15, are employed and get paid for it or are unemployed and are actively looking for. a job. And the tragic part is that this rate is falling. It was at 17.7% in May 2016. Since then it nearly halved.

2) The labour participation rate of men is considerably higher. It was 67.82% in February 2021, even though it has been falling. Hence, two in three men over the age of 15, are employed and are getting paid for it, or are unemployed and actively looking for a job. For women, this ratio is less than one in ten. That’s the difference between the two sexes and it’s huge. 

3) Urban women are in a much worse position on this front. The labour participation rate for urban women stood at 6.56% in February 2021. The rate had peaked at 16.58% in August 2016 and has been falling ever since. What does this mean? It means that it is more difficult for a woman to be employed and get paid, if she is in urban India than in comparison to rural India.

Also, the dramatic fall in the rate since August 2016, tells us that once a woman loses a job or a source of income, it is very difficult for her to get it back. And finally, very few women in urban India are stepping out of their homes to go to work and get paid for it. This has only increased post the spread of covid. The labour participation rate for women was 9.92% in January 2020. It’s not at 6.56%.

4) Now comes the worst part. Between January 2016 and February 2021, the number of women greater than 15 years of age has gone up by 5.41 crore to 49.49 crore. Hence, the number of women who have entered the working age population has gone up by 12.26% (5.41 crore expressed as a percentage of 49.49 crore). On the other hand, the female labour force, has shrunk by 2.75 crore to 4.66 crore. In January 2016, it was at 7.41 crore. This is a collapse of 37% (2.75 crore expressed as a percentage of 7.41 crore).

Let me just repeat this again. While the working age population for women over the last five years has gone up by 12.26%, the female labour force has collapsed by 37.11%. This also explains the fall in unemployment rate for women, given that much fewer women are actively looking for a job. Many women who haven’t been able to find jobs, have stopped actively looking and simply dropped out of the labour force.

Economists have struggled to come up with an explanation for this phenomenon. One possible explanation lies in the fact that the number of jobs available haven’t grown at the pace that could accommodate the new individuals, both men and women, entering the workforce. Hence, in a patriarchal society, men in deciding positions, have offered jobs to other men, forcing women who have searched and not found jobs to stop actively looking for a job and drop out of the labour force altogether.

5) Let’s take a look at the overall population. The working age population, between January 2016 and February 2021, has gone up from 93.85 crore to 105.8 crore, this implies an increase of 11.95 crore. Nevertheless, the number of people employed or unemployed and looking for a job, that is the total labour force, has fallen from 44.76 crore to 42.85 crore, or by 1.91 crore.

So, the working age population has increased by 11.95 crore between May 2016 and February 2021, but the total labour force as such has fallen by 1.91 crore. What does this really mean?

While, the total labour force has shrunk by 1.91 crore, 2.75 crore women have dropped out of it. This basically means that the number of men in the labour force has gone up.

Hence, the brunt of India’s unemployment problem is being borne by women. Women who lose their jobs find it difficult to find a new one and over a period of time simply drop out of the labour force. Many women who enter the labour force and actively look for jobs, are unable to find one and eventually stop searching and drop out of the labour force.

Given that chances of men finding a job are higher, they continue to look for a job and the situation is not as bad as it is for women. Between January 2016 and February 2021, number of men who crossed the age of 15 and entered the working age population, increased by 6.54 crore to 56.30 crore.

During the same time, the number of men entering the labour force (that is either they were employed or were unemployed and actively looking for a job) increased by 83.62 lakh to 38.19 crore. Hence, in this case of men, the labour force at least hasn’t shrunk.

6) Given that more and more women are dropping out of the labour force, it makes it easier for the men who don’t drop out of the labour force to find a job, from the opportunities that come up. (I am using the word easier here and not easy. Kindly appreciate the difference between the two).

7) Urban women are likely to be more educated, but their labour participation rate is very low. Hence, what that means is that they are unable to utilise their education to work and earn money in the process.

8) Now let’s take a look at how things have been post-covid.  In January 2020, before covid had struck, the working age population had  stood at 103.13 crore. By February 2021, this had jumped to 105.8 crore, a jump of 2.67 crore. Meanwhile, the labour force as of January 2020 stood at 44.24 crore. It has since shrunk to 42.85 crore, by 1.39 crore. So, post-covid, the working age population has gone up by 2.67 crore, but the labour force has shrunk by 1.39 crore.

How have the women done on this front? The working age population post covid for women has gone up by 92.23 lakh whereas the labour force has shrunk by 78.03 lakh. Again, more women have dropped out of the labour force than men, given that the labour force has shrunk overall by 1.39 crore. Also, do keep in mind that the fact that a lower number and proportion of women enter the labour force in the first place.

To conclude, the world celebrated the international women’s day a few days back (on March 8). On that day, the corporates and the government institutions talked about the importance of the women who worked for them. The social media influencers talked about women. Many women talked about what it means for them to be a woman.

But almost none of them talked about one of the most important issues at hand, the fact that Indian women are bearing the brunt of India’s unemployment problem.

If you are reading this(man or woman) please share it with your friends and family. The first step towards solving any problem is knowing and acknowledging that it exists.

Revealing the Real Picture Behind India’s Unemployment Problem

BA Kiya, MBA Kiya, 
Lagta Hai Sab Kuch Aiwen Kiya 
— With due apologies to Sampooran Singh Kalra.

The rate of unemployment as of February 2021 stood at 6.9%. This doesn’t sound very high. But the calculation of this figure misses out on a very important nuance. 

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I go by the moniker of Shikshit Berozgar (or educated unemployed). This is basically a joke I crack on myself on not being gainfully employed with a corporate, in the traditional sense of the term.

Nevertheless, on a more serious note, unemployment is a very serious problem in India. In fact, in the recent past, #modi_rojgar_do has been a top Twitter trend. This gives me a reason to look into this economic and social illness which impacts the society at large and the youth in particular, very badly. Of course, nothing is what it seems, which is why it is important to go into details.

I will use unemployment data published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, which has now been available for a period of five years, hence, will give us a decent long-term trend.

Let’s first look at the unemployment rate over the last five years, starting from January 2016 onward.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

What does the chart tell us? The unemployment rate has varied quite a bit between January 2016 and February 2021. As of February 2021, the rate of unemployment stood at 6.9%.  Hence, things have improved from April 2020, when the unemployment rate hit a high of 23.52% and nearly one-fourth of the labour force was unemployed. This was when the lockdown enforced by the government was at its peak.

Nonetheless, the unemployment rate is still very high in comparison to the low of 3.37%, which was achieved in July 2017. It needs to be mentioned here that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) came into effect from July 1, 2017 and has been responsible for increased formalisation of the Indian economy. Hence, many informal businesses have been shut down. Formal businesses tend to be more mechanised and hence, employ fewer people, can be one possible explanation for the higher unemployment.

Moving forward if we were to read only the above chart, we are likely to come to the conclusion that the negative economic impact of the covid pandemic and the general slowdown in the Indian economy, over the years, are gone. But there is some nuance we are missing out on here.

While I have shared the unemployment rate in the above chart, I haven’t told you how the term unemployment is defined. A person is categorised as unemployed “because of a lack of job and where such a person is actively looking for a job”. The word to mark here is actively. At the risk of repetition, a person can be categorised as unemployed only if he doesn’t have a job and is searching for one.

As the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) puts it, a person categorised as unemployed, “should be unemployed on the date of the survey, should be actively looking for a job in the 100 hundred days (approximately three months) preceding the date of the survey and should be willing to take up the job if a job is found.”

They further point out: “A person is considered to be actively looking for a job if such a person has contacted potential employers for jobs, contacted employment agencies, placement agencies, appeared for job interviews, responded to job advertisements, online employment sites, made applications, submitted resumes to potential employers or reached out to family members, friends, teachers to look for jobs from them.”

To put it in short, waiting for a job offer to come, is not considered as actively looking for a job.

It will soon become clear why have I gone into such detail trying to explain what being unemployed exactly means. First let’s take a look at the following chart, which plots the labour participation rate.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

In fact, this chart is at the heart of the issue of Indian unemployment. As can be seen from it, the labour participation rate has been falling over the years. It was at a peak of 48.47% in May 2016 and fell to a low of 35.57% in April 2020. In February 2021, it stood at 40.5%.

Now what does this mean? Labour participation rate is the ratio of the labour force to the population greater than 15 years of age. And what is the labour force? As per CMIE, labour force consists of persons who are of 15 years of age or more, and are employed, or are unemployed and are actively looking for a job.

What has happened in the last five years? Let’s take the case of May 2016. In May 2016, the population greater than 15 years or what is referred to as working-age population, stood at 94.58 crore. Of this, 45.84 crore individuals formed the labour force, which means they were either employed or were unemployed and actively looking for a job. Hence, labour participation rate, which is the ratio of the labour force to the population greater than 15 years of age, was at 48.47%.

Now what’s the scene in February 2021? The population greater than 15 years stood at 105.80 crore. The labour force stood at 42.85 crore. This implies a labour participation rate of 40.5%.

In simple English, in February 2021, a smaller proportion the working age population is working or is unemployed and looking for a job, than was the case in May 2016.

The working age population, between May 2016 and February 2021, has gone up from 94.58 crore to 105.8 crore, this implies an increase of 11.22 crore.

Nevertheless, the number of people employed or unemployed and looking for a job, that is the total labour force, has fallen from 45.84 crore to 42.85 crore, or by 2.99 crore.

So, the working age population has increased by 11.22 crore between May 2016 and February 2021, but the total labour force as such has fallen by 2.99 crore. This is India’s real unemployment problem, which isn’t reflected in the unemployment rate, and needs a lot more digging.

What is happening here? A very small proportion of the population is studying more and some may also be retiring early. But that hardly explains the scale of this problem. The explanation lies in the fact that more people are simply dropping out of the labour force, because they are not able to find jobs over a period of time and hence, are not actively looking for jobs anymore.

Let’s look at how the situation has changed post-covid. In January 2020, before covid had struck, the working age population had  stood at 103.13 crore. By February 2021, this had jumped to 105.8 crore, a jump of 2.67 crore. Meanwhile, the labour force as of January 2020 stood at 44.24 crore. It has since shrunk to 42.85 crore, by 1.39 crore. So, post-covid, the working age population has gone up by 2.67 crore, but the workforce has shrunk by 1.39 crore.

Clearly, covid has only accentuated the larger unemployment trend India was already going through. In a sense, many jobs have simply been destroyed, leading to people dropping out of the workforce and in the process, making the overall unemployment number look much better than it actually is.

In the conventional definition of unemployment, individuals who are not actively looking for a job and drop out of the workforce, do not get counted, but ultimately, they are also not gainfully employed. And that’s where the problem lies and explains hashtags like #modi_rojgar_do.

If you still haven’t got it, let me share a very simple example. Let’s say the labour force has 100 individuals. The working age population of people above 15 years of age comprises 200 individuals. Hence, the labour participation rate is 50%. Let’s further assume that the unemployment rate is 10%. This means that 10 individuals are unemployed (10% of 100) and are actively looking for a job.

These individuals do not get a job for a while and let’s further assume that four of them stop actively looking for a job. Given this, the labour force size will fall to 96 (100 minus 4). Those categorised as unemployed will fall to six (10 minus 4). The rate of unemployment will fall to 6.25% (6 expressed as a percentage of 96).

So, the rate of unemployment will come down from 10% to 6.25%, nevertheless, the number of people without jobs will continue to remain at 10. The labour participation rate will come down to 48% (96 expressed as a percentage of 200), from the earlier 50%.  This is how the maths will work out.  This is precisely what is happening in India, of course, at a much larger level.

Now let’s take a look at the unemployment rate and labour participation rate among the youth, that is those aged between 20 and 29. This is where things get very interesting.

Source: Author calculations using data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

As can be seen from the above chart, the unemployment among youth, which was always on the higher side, has gone even higher, in the last five years. It peaked at 40.41% in April 2020, and in February 2021, was still at a very high rate of 25.68%.

What this means is that one in every four Indian youths is unemployed and is actively looking for a job. And that is clearly bad news. The situation has deteriorated over the last five years.

Now let’s take a look at the labour participation rate among youth.

Source: Author calculations using data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

As is the overall trend, the labour force participation rate among youth has come down dramatically over the years. It peaked at 53.18% in May 2016 and in February 2021, it stood at 45.42%. Of course, one explanation for this is lies in youth spending more years in college. Nevertheless, the broader explanation for this lies in youth dropping out of the labour force given their inability to find a job. Also, even those who are in college are actively looking for a job. Or sometimes college is just an excuse to postpone actively looking for a job. These are points that need to be remembered.

What explains this situation? One reason for this lies in the fact that the investment to gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen over the years from a high of 34.31% of the GDP in 2011-12 and is expected to be at 30.91% in 2020-21. Hence, with a lower investment in the economy, fewer jobs are being created.

Over the last few years, the government has made attempts at formalizing the economy through a harebrained measure like demonetization and a half-baked measure like goods and services tax.

As an August 2018 Mint Street Memo published by the Reserve Bank of India points out:

“The MSME ( micro, small and medium enterprises) sector has witnessed two major recent shocks, viz., demonetisation and introduction of goods and services tax (GST). For instance, contractual labour in both the wearing apparel and gems and jewellery sectors reportedly suffered as payments from employers became constrained after demonetisation (RBI, 2017). Similarly, the introduction of GST led to increase in compliance costs and other operating costs for MSMEs as most of them were brought into the tax net.”

This has hit jobs badly as well.

It needs to be understood here that many employees of MSMEs that shut down did not come under the income tax slab. Nevertheless, whenever they make a purchase as a consumer, they do pay some form of indirect tax. This is a point those celebrating the increasing formalisation of the economy, seem to miss out on.

Let’s take a look at a few more trends, starting with female labour participation rate.


Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

This is a very disturbing chart. The female labour participation rate has crashed to just 10.89%. In urban India, it was at 6.56% in February. This means more and more women are getting educated but are not working in salaried jobs. In fact, this is a trend that started before 2014 and it has only accentuated since then. As per surveys carried out by the Labour Bureau, the female labour participation rate in 2012-13 and 2013-14 stood at 25% and 28.7%.

Economists have struggled to come up with an explanation for this. One possible explanation lies in the fact that the number of jobs available haven’t grown at the pace that could accommodate the new individuals, both men and women, entering the workforce. Hence, in a patriarchal society, men in deciding positions, have offered jobs to other men. This needs more research, and I will write about it in detail in the days to come.

Another interesting trend is the unemployment rate depending on the education level. The following chart plots the unemployment rate by level of education for February 2021.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

While I have only shared data for February 2021, this is a trend that has played out over the years.

World over there is a wage premium for education, which means, the more educated you are, the higher your income is likely to be. That might be the case in India as well, but along with that we have another very interesting phenomenon.

The rate of unemployment increases with the number of years of education, with one in every five graduates being unemployed. The fact many graduates are unemployed again explains the popularity of trends like #modi_rojgar_do. The graduates have the time, the energy and the internet bandwidth, to get such an important issue to trend.

The larger explanation for this lies in the fact that graduates tend to wait for that good job, which never really comes. That is a choice that the less educated don’t make.

Let’s now look at a chart which plots the rate of unemployment across different age brackets, for the month of February 2021.

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

The rate of unemployment is highest at the younger ages and as one ages, it comes down dramatically.

The high rate of unemployment for the ages between 15-19 can be explained by the fact that more individuals now spend time in school and go to college. But what about rates beyond that bracket?

The interesting thing is that rate of unemployment in the age category 25-29 stood at 11.53% in February 2021. For the age group, 30-34, it was at only 1.32%. While I have only shared data for February 2021, this is a trend that has played out over the years.

What’s happening here? It seems this is a problem that isn’t just peculiar to India and is prevalent in other parts of the world, including South Africa, Egypt and countries in the Middle East.

A part of the problem, like most disappointments in life, is a mismatch of expectations that the unemployed youth have, and the situation as it prevails.

As Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write in Good Economics for Hard Times:

“They [i.e. the youth] were told that if they studied hard they would get a good job, meaning mostly a desk job or a teaching job. This was closer to the truth in their parents’ generation than it is today… The growth in government jobs slowed and eventually stopped in the face of budgetary pressures.”

In fact, in the Indian case, the pace of creation of government jobs has slowed down over the years. As far as central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) are concerned, the total number of employees has gone down over the years.

Take a look at the following table.

Employment at CPSEs


Source: Public Sector Enterprises Survey 2018-19.

The number of employees in 2009-10 had stood at 14.90 lakh. It has fallen to 10.33 lakh in 2018-19. This is largely true of the government as a whole. But the fascination for a government job still remains strong and there is an economic incentive for it as well.

As can be seen from the above table, while the number of jobs in CPSEs has come down, the emoluments have gone up. In 2009-10, it stood at Rs 5.89 lakh. In 2018-19, it had jumped to Rs 14.78 lakh. And this is just the emoluments. There are other things that come with a government job, employment guarantee for life, access to good medical facilities, pension in many cases, and so on.

This explains why every few months we get stories in the media about graduates, engineers, post graduates and even PhDs, applying for low-level government jobs like that of peons, sweepers etc.

As Banerjee and Duflo write:

“There are small fraction of jobs that are much more attractive than the rest, for the reasons having nothing to do with productivity. The best example are government jobs… In the poorest countries, public-sector workers earn more than double the average wage in the private sector. And this is not counting generous health and pension benefits.”

What this ensures is that many individuals spend the best part of their youth preparing and writing exams to get into a government job. As Banerjee and Duflo write: “These young people are mostly waiting for jobs they will not get… If the government jobs stopped being quite so desirable, the economy would gain many years of productive labour.”

But given that there are very few government jobs going around at the end of the day, the futility of it all, ultimately hits individuals who cannot see a world beyond a government job. What this basically means is that as people age, they eventually do start working, once their overall expectations fall in line with what is on offer.

So, other than the fact that there aren’t enough jobs going around for anyone, the love of a government job also seems to hold people back.

To conclude, you won’t get to read this anywhere in the mainstream media. Hence, it is very important that you continue supporting my work.

PS: This is not to say that all was well before 2014. It clearly wasn’t. As the Report on Employment-Unemployment Survey of 2013-14 points out: “Full employment was available to only 63.4 per cent of self-employed persons, the figure being as low as 42.1 among ‘casual’ workers.” The government has done away with the publishing of this report, since then. Such big structural problems don’t manifest overnight. If not tackled on a war footing, they only get worse with time and which is what seems to have happened.

Why 2.8 Crore Indians Applied for 90,000 Jobs in Indian Railways

indian flag
The Indian Railways recently got 2.8 crore applications for around 90,000 jobs it had advertised for.

This basically means that the ratio of number of applicants to the number of jobs stands at 311:1. Further, it means that 18.7% of India’s youth workforce (people in the age group 18-29) applied for it. Or to put it a little more simplistically, every one in five individuals who are a part of India’s youth workforce, applied for these jobs.

This is even without taking any education qualifications into account. If we do that (i.e. people who have at least passed the tenth standard or some such parameter), the proportion of India’s youth workforce which applied for these jobs in the Indian Railways would go up even further.

If this is not an indication of India’s massive jobs crisis, we don’t know what is.

The argument being offered against this is that just because someone has applied for a government job, does not mean he or she is unemployed. Of course, this is a fair argument, but an incomplete one. Allow me to explain.

Let’s us look at Table 1, a table we have used multiple times before.

Table 1: 

Table 1 clearly tells us that only 60.6% of India’s workforce which is looking for a job all through the year, is able to find one. So, yes Indians may not be unemployed, but they are terribly underemployed. Hence, nearly 40% of Indians looking for a job all through the year are unable to find one. Or two in five Indians who are looking for a job all through the year are unable to find one.

Further, this underemployment translates into low levels of income, as can be seen from Table 2.

Table 2: Self-employed/Regular wage salaried/Contract/Casual Workers
according to Average Monthly Earnings (in %) 

Table 2 shows us the income levels of India’s workforce. As far as the self-employed and the contract workers are concerned, nearly two-thirds of them make up to Rs 7,500 per month or Rs 90,000 per year. In case of contract workers, more than 84% of contract workers earn up to Rs 7,500 per month or Rs 90,000 per year.

The per capita income in 2015-2016 was at Rs 1.07 lakh. This basically means that a bulk of India’s non-salaried workforce, earns a significantly lower income than the per capita income.

The non-salaried workforce works largely in the informal sector, which forms a bulk of India’s economy (as high as 92% as per one estimate). As the Economic Survey of 2015-2016, points out: “By most measures, informal sector jobs are much worse than formal sector ones-wages are, on average, more than 20 times higher in the formal sector.”

Given these low levels of income primarily because of huge underemployment, so many people tend to apply for government jobs in general, and the recent vacancies in Indian Railways are no exception to this. People are looking for a regular and stable source of monthly income. They want to get rid of the irregularity of payment that they have to regularly deal with in the informal sector.

The Indian government is a good paymaster, especially at lower levels. As the Report of the Seventh Pay Commission points out: “To obtain a comparative picture of the salaries paid in the government with that in the private sector enterprises the Commission engaged the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad to conduct a study. According to the study the total emoluments of a General Helper, who is the lowest ranked employee in the government is Rs 22,579, more than two times the emoluments of a General Helper in the private sector organizations surveyed at Rs 8,000-9,500.”

Hence, the IIM Ahmedabad study “on comparing job families between the government and private/public sector has brought out the fact that…at lower levels salaries are much lower in the private sector as compared to government jobs.”

In this scenario, it isn’t surprising that so many people apply for government jobs in India. The employment opportunities in the informal sector are irregular and simply don’t pay enough. India’s huge underemployment gets reflected in the number of people applying for government jobs.

And at the end of the day, underemployment is also a representation of unemployment and the huge jobs crisis that India is facing. There simply aren’t enough jobs/employment opportunities which will keep individuals occupied for the full year, going around, for everyone who is a part of India’s burgeoning workforce.

Indeed, that is something to worry about. And what is even worrying is that the Modi government is not worrying about this huge issue.

Postscript: Dear Reader, you must be wondering why are we still using 2015-2016 data even in 2018-2019. The Labour Bureau carried out six household-based Annual Employment-Unemployment Surveys (EUS) between 2010 and 2016. Of these, reports of five rounds have been released till date. The last report was released in September 2016. The question is, why has the report for the sixth round of the Survey not been released till date.

Recently, in an answer to a question raised in Parliament, the government said, “On the recommendations of the Task Force on Employment, however, this survey has been discontinued.” Basically, a survey that brought bad news in the form of huge underemployment that India has been facing, has been discontinued, and then the government goes around talking about lack of data.

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on April 16, 2018.

Mr Adhia, GST Needs “Complete Overhauling”, “Some Rejig” Just Won’t Help

Yscissor

Yesterday evening, the social media was abuzz with a statement that Hasmukh Adhia, the revenue secretary, had given in an interview to the Press Trust of India (PTI) regarding the Goods and Services Tax (GST). As he said: “There is a complete overhauling that is required… it is possible that some items in the same chapter are divided.”

The website of The Hindu still has this report. You can also read it on Scroll.in.
This statement was later changed to: “There is need for some rejig in rates… it is possible that some items in the same chapter are divided.” The interview on the PTI website, currently has this statement and not the earlier one.

The phrase complete overhauling [of GST] has been replaced by some rejig in [GST] rates, by the PTI. Of course, a complete overhauling is majorly different from some rejig, but this is the closest that someone senior in the Modi government has publicly admitted that the implementation of the GST has been a disaster.

There are questions that need to be asked, even though the chances of getting any answers from the Modi government, remain nil.

1) Why was the government in such a hurry to launch the GST, when it was clearly not ready for it. This lack of preparation was already visible even before GST became the order of the day.

As Navin Kumar, the chairman of the GST network, in an interview published on June 27, 2017, told Business Standard: “It should be a stable system. Problems that surfaced during the first phase of the testing have been resolved. We did the testing on the basis of the rules that came in December. After that, some changes were made to the rules. Those changes we have absorbed now, so there is no time to do beta testing for that.”

Here is the Chairman of the network on which the GST is implemented saying that they haven’t had the time to test it properly. What more evidence is needed for the system not being completely ready?

Bharat Goenka, the managing director of Tally Solutions, one of the companies which has made a software for customers to help them file the GST returns, made a similar

In an interview with the Business Standard published on June 23, 2017, he was asked: “Is the problem essentially with the cramped timeline? Is July 1 too optimistic?” He answered: “It is indeed very cramped. While it is easy to add a new feature to software with respect to its functioning, developing robust software takes time. Whenever you make a change, you need to harden the software and that takes time. If you do not give it time, you end up with fragile software and get potentially surprising results. It is a high-risk environment. So, it is not sensible to try and do such mega rollouts without robust backing.”

Obviously, the government was in a hurry to launch the GST without adequate preparation. In the process, it ended up creating the mess that currently prevails. And given that concerns were raised by people who were part of the process of the launch, this is clearly not benefit of hindsight.

2) Nearly four months after the launch, a lot of confusion prevails on many fronts. Even the chartered accountants lack clarity on issues. This tells us again that there wasn’t enough communication from the government on this front. In countries where GST (or value added tax as it is more popularly called) has been successfully implemented, an adequate amount of time is spent in training those who will be a part of the system implementing the GST (both inside and outside the government). This, has clearly not happened in India.

3) In fact, much before the GST was launched, analysts had pointed out that there were way too many GST rates, and that made the entire system fairly complicated, for those who need to follow the system.

The examples are now out.  A newreport in The Times of India quotes a supermarket chain owner as saying: “Tax on snacks like aloo bhujia, potato chips, samosa, kachori is 12%. Now the tax rate for cashews is 5%, but I can’t figure out if masala cashew is a snack or a standalone item.”

Similar issues have cropped up when it comes to sweets. Milk sweets come under the 5 per cent bracket, but the moment a silver foil is put on it, tax shoots up to 18 per cent. As Congress leader Veerapa Moily put it: “For example, is Kitkat a chocolate or a biscuit? Is coconut oil considered as hair oil or cooking oil?”

A ministry of finance press release towards the end of September 2017 pointed out: “The total number of tax payers who were required to file monthly returns for August 2017 is 68.20 lakhs, of which, as on 25th September, 2017, 37.63 lakh GSTR 3B returns have been filed.” Around 55 per cent of those who needed to file GST returns, actually filed it.

Given the way, in which the system has been designed, this isn’t surprising at all. What this has also brought out is the fact that Indian traders are digitally challenged, and it will take time for them to catch up to GST. Meanwhile, the economy will have to suffer because of this.

4) The multiplicity of tax rates has led to a situation where the tax rates on different products make very little sense.  While the GST on condoms is 0 per cent, that on sanitary napkins is 12 per cent. One explanation provided for this is that only branded sanitary napkins invite a GST. But why even make this distinction? Does the GST apply only on branded condoms? Or more importantly, is there anything like an unbranded condom? These issues will simply not arise if there were fewer rates of tax.

Another explanation provided is that the mandate of the GST Council which decided on the GST rates, was fitment of taxes i.e. the GST rate on a product must be close to the existing taxes on it.

This is a rather silly observation given the status of the GST Council. If the idea was mere fitment any junior level bureaucrat could have done it. The fact that GST Council comprised of the finance ministers of all states and the finance minister of the central government, means that such anomalies could have been easily corrected.

There are several such inconsistencies, for the lack of a better word. The GST on environmentally friendly hybrid cars as well as fossil fuel guzzling SUVs is the same at 43 per cent (28 per cent GST and 15 per cent surcharge). Before GST became the order of the day, the total taxes on SUVs added to around 50 per cent.[i] In case of hybrids the tax before GST was around 29 per cent.[ii] This has led to the companies increasing the prices of the hybrid models of their cars.

And there is more. The GST rates on diamonds and gold are at 0.25 per cent and 3 per cent respectively. But the GST on something as useful as matchboxes (handmade ones) is 5 per cent. Why is this the case? Is it because those who run diamond and gold firms have deeper pockets funding political parties, than those running firms making matchboxes?

5) The rate of tax for most services has gone up from 12.36 per cent in 2014 and 15 per cent till June 30, 2017, to 18 per cent under GST. Of course, a part of this jump was supposed to be neutralised because of the input tax credit available under GST. But anecdotal evidence clearly suggests that the price of services has gone up because of GST. The government needs to study this and if this is true, it needs to cut the rate of tax on services to 15 per cent.

6) Also, the Modi government has tried to implement a convoluted and a complicated GST, which has “privatised compliance”. This has hit the small and medium enterprises(SMEs) the hardest. This also shows that we haven’t really learnt the lessons from our past.

One reason for India’s big black economy has been the high income tax rates over the years. In the early 1970s, the highest marginal rate of tax was as high as 97 per cent. Of course, at such a high rate most people who should have been paying income tax, did not. Not surprising, why would anyone give away Rs 97 out of every Rs 100 that he earned over a certain level, to the government.

The point being that tax compliance is always better at lower rates. At 28 per cent and higher, the peak Indian GST rate is among the highest in the world. Hopefully, as the number of tax rates under GST gets slashed in the years to come, the higher rates will go.

To conclude, GST has hit the small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which were already reeling under the negative impacts of demonetisation very hard. This is something that needs to be corrected very quickly, simply because it is the SMEs which create jobs in any growing economy. As finance minister Arun Jaitley recently told ET Now: “Bulk of the jobs in India are created by SMEs, by the micro industries, by self employment. Gone are the days where only the government sector created jobs in the government or the organised sector created jobs.”

And given that one million Indian youth are entering the workforce every month, the country needs SMEs to create jobs more than it ever did before. Given this, the GST needs complete overhauling, in order make it simple and uncomplicated. A simple rejig won’t do. Hope Mr Adhia and his boss in the finance ministry are listening.

[i] A.Modi, Planning to buy a luxury car or an SUV? GST may save you up to Rs 85,000, http://www.business-standard.com, May 21, 2017.

[ii] A. Khan, Hybrid Cars May Become A Thing Of The Past Because Of GST, www.businessworld.in, July 4, 2017.

The column originally appeared in the Huffington Post on October 23, 2017.

Dear PM Modi, India is Already Land of Self-Employed, and It Ain’t Working

narendra modi

The prime minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech made last week said: “The Government has launched several new initiatives in the employment related schemes and also in the manner in which the training is imparted for the development of human resource according to the needs of the 21st century. We have launched a massive program to provide collateral free loans to the youth. Our youth should become independent, he should get the employment, he should become the provider of employment. Over the past three years, ‘Pradhanmantri Mudra Yojana’ has led to millions and millions of youth becoming self-dependent. It’s not just that, one youth is providing employment to one, two or three more people.”

Adding to this, the Bhartiya Janata Party president Amit Shah recently said: “the youth have turned into job-creators from job-seekers“. Dear Reader, I would request you to keep these points in your head, while I set the overall context of this piece. As I have written on several previous occasions in the past, one million Indians enter the workforce every month. That makes it 1.2 crore Indians a year. There is not enough work going around for all these young individuals entering the workforce every year.

While, it is not possible for the government to create jobs for such a huge number of people, it is possible that the government makes it easier for the private sector to create jobs. (I will not go into this, simply because this is a separate topic in itself and I guess I will deal with this on some other occasion).

Take a look at Table 1. This is a table that I have used on previous occasions as well. But I need to repeat it, in order to set the context for this piece.

Table 1: Percentage distribution of persons available for 12 months 

What does Table 1 tell us? It tells us that only 60.6 per cent of the individuals who were looking for work all through the year, were able to find it. This basically means that nearly 40 out of every 100 Indians who are a part of the workforce and were looking for work all through the year, could not find regular work. In rural India, around half of the workforce wasn’t able to find regular work through the year.

This table is at the heart of India’s unemployment problem. Actually, we do not have an unemployment problem, what we have is an underemployment problem. There isn’t enough work going from everyone who joins the workforce. The solution that prime minister Narendra Modi has to this is that India’s youth should become self-dependent and seek self-employment. In the era of post-truth, this sounds like a terrific idea. But this is nothing more than marketing spin.

Let’s look at some data on this front. As the Report on the Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey, 2016, points out: “At the All India level, 46.6 per cent of the workers were found to be self-employed… followed by 32.8 per cent as casual labour. Only 17 per cent of the employed persons were wage/salary earners and the rest 3.7 per cent were contract workers.”

The point being that nearly half of India’s workforce is already self-employed. And they aren’t doing well in comparison to those who have regular jobs. Take a look at Table 2.

Table 2: Self-employed/Regular wage salaried/Contract/Casual Workers
according to Average Monthly Earnings (in %) 

What does Table 2 tell us? It tells us very clearly that self-employment is not as well-paying as a regular salaried job is. As is clear from the table nearly two-thirds of the self-employed make up to Rs 7,500 per month. In case of the regular salaried lot this is at a little over 38 per cent. Clearly, those with regular jobs make much more money on an average.

Further, only 4 per cent of the self-employed make Rs 20,000 or more during the course of a month. In comparison, more than 19 per cent of individuals with jobs make Rs 20,000 or more during the course of a month.

What Table 1 and Table 2 tell us is that India’s youth have already taken to being self-employed. Hence, there is nothing new in Narendra Modi’s idea. Further, it is clearly not working.

As Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write in Poor Economics: “The sheer number of business owners among the poor is impressive. After all, everything seems to militate against the poor being entrepreneurs. They have less capital of their own (almost by definition) and… little access to formal insurance, banks and other sources of inexpensive finance…. Another characteristic of the businesses of the poor and the near-poor is that, on average, they are not making much money.”

The point here is that a large part of the workforce is not self-employed by choice but are self-employed because they have no other option. Banerjee and Duflo call them ‘reluctant entrepreneurs’. The phrase summarises the situation very well.

Other than the reluctant entrepreneurs, more than 30 per cent of the workforce comprises casual labourers, who seek employment on an almost daily basis. The reluctant entrepreneurs and casual labourers looking for daily work essentially tell us that no one can really afford to stay unemployed.

Hence, the problem is not a lack of employment but a lack of employment which is productive enough.

Prime minister Modi talked about his government launching, “several new initiatives in the employment related schemes and also in the manner in which the training is imparted for the development of human resource according to the needs of the 21st century.”

How good does the data look on this front? As the Volume 2 of the Economic Survey of 2016-2017 points out: “For urban poor, Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAYNULM) imparts skill training for self and wage-employment through setting up self-employment ventures by providing credit at subsidized rates of interest. The government has now expanded the scope of DAY-NULM from 790 cities to 4,041 statutory towns in the country. So far, 8,37,764 beneficiaries have been skill-trained [and] 4,27,470 persons have been given employment.”

The annual report of 2016-2017 of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship of the government of India makes an estimate about the number of people trained by different ministries during the course of the financial year. For the period April to December 2016, the number is at around 19.59 lakh. The annual target was set at 99.35 lakh. Given this, the gap between the target set and the target achieved is huge.

Another way of looking at this is that 1.2 crore Indians are entering the workforce every year. They have had an average education of around five years (i.e. they have passed primary school). Given this, they really don’t have any work-related skillset. At best, they can add and subtract, and perhaps read a little.

Hence, they need to be trained or there need to be enough low skill jobs going around. Real estate and construction, the two sectors that can create these kind of jobs, are in a huge mess. This is something that can be sorted, but in order to do that some serious decisions on black money need to made. This includes cleaning up of political funding and the change in land usage regulations at state government level.

Take a look at the following graphic (Figure 1) reproduced from the annual report of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

Figure 1: 

What Figure 1 tells us very clearly is that the scale that is needed to train people is simply not there. And this will lead to a substantial chunk of individuals entering the workforce looking for low end self-employment opportunities anyway, as has been the case in the past. Or people will continue to stick to agriculture.

Prime Minister Modi in his speech further said: “Over the past three years, ‘Pradhanmantri Mudra Yojana’ has led to millions and millions of youth becoming self-dependent. It’s not just that, one youth is providing employment to one, two or three more people.”

Let’s look at this statement in some detail. Between April 2015 and August 11, 2017, the government gave out Mudra (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Bank) loans worth Rs 3.63 lakh crore to 8.7 crore individuals. This works out to an average loan of around Rs 41,724. There is no evidence until now whether this is working or not. Can a loan of a little under Rs 42,000 provide employment to one, two or three more people, is a question which hasn’t been answered up until now.

The CEO of Mudra was asked by NDTV recently, as to how many jobs had the Mudra loans created. He said: “We are yet to make an assessment on that… We don’t have a number right now, but I understand that NITI Aayog is making an effort to do that.”Given this, Mudra loans making millions of youth self-dependent is presently nothing more than something that prime minister Modi likes to believe in.

While he is entitled to his beliefs, I would like to look at some data before concluding that Mudra loans are the answer to India’s job crisis.

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on August 21, 2017.