Few would be aware that the Indian Government's own calculations reveal that employment growth has plummeted from 2.7 percent a year in the pre-Liberalization period to just over 1 percent in the Liberalization period.
Annual Addition To Organized Sector Employment:
(hundred thousand jobs)
Years Growth
1990-91 3.9
1991-92 3.2
1992-93 1.2
1993-94 2.0
1994-95 1.5
1995-96 4.1
1996-97 3.1
1997-98 -0.8
1998-99 -0.6
1999-00 -1.5
2000-01 -1.7
The CIA World Factbook puts Indian unemployment growth at 9.1% and the pattern of growth in the Liberalization era has been that far fewer jobs are created for each increase in the national GDP. This is a devastating fact of India's sulking economy. While economic reforms may have given a boost to industrial productivity and brought in foreign investment in capital-intensive areas but the boom has not created jobs. This was not unexpected. According to a report by the Washington-based Institute Of Policy Studies, the combined sales of world's top 200 MNCs is now greater than the combined GDP of all but the world's nine largest economies.
Yet the total direct employment generated by these MNCs is a mere 18.8 million which is one-hundredth of one percent of the global workforce. This is true for the Indian economy. The strong and rich are making the poor worse off. Sixty percent of India's workforce is self-employed, many of whom are very poor. Nearly 30% are casual workers. Only about 10% are regular employees, of which only two-fifths are employed in the public sector. Moreover, it may be noted that over 70% of the labour force in all sectors combined (organized and unorganized) is either illiterate or educated below the primary level.
That is not all. Atal Behari Vajpayee had sometime back said that terrorism and social tension increased only because of this increasingly depressing state. The Planning Commission, in a report on employment published last year in India, revealed that joblessness was increasing due to the recklessness of employers in both the private and public sector who have taken to a policy of shedding labour.
Liberalization has failed to teach Indian employers even the most basic of management skills. Red-tapism and nepotism are common to all Indian workplaces. Is India shining or whining?
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