What does economic growth mean when an economy grows faster than its capacity to provide people with a secure livelihood? This is the deceptively simple question at the heart of India Out of Work: Rethinking India’s Growth Story, by economists Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati K Parida. The book turns its gaze away from the headline numbers of India’s growth story and towards what those numbers conceal: an economy struggling to generate enough productive, adequately paid and secure work for a rapidly expanding working-age population.
Unemployment, underemployment, the persistence of informal work, the return of workers to agriculture and the exclusion of women from paid employment are not, the authors argue, disconnected failures but symptoms of a deeper structural crisis. What emerges is a troubling paradox. India may be growing, but growth is increasingly failing at the very task that makes economic transformation meaningful: creating the conditions under which people can work, earn and build more secure lives. In asking us to rethink India’s growth story, Mehrotra and Parida pose a more fundamental question: what is the value of growth if it cannot generate enough work?
The anxieties animating the recent CJP protests, where young people took to the streets over examination irregularities, the cost and quality of education, and the uncertainty surrounding their futures, are symptomatic of a crisis that extends far beyond paper leaks or elections. What is at stake is the increasingly fragile promise that education will provide a pathway to a secure and productive life. India Out of Work locates this anxiety within a much deeper structural failure, arguing that India’s education system cannot be understood separately from the labour market it is supposed to feed into. The authors write: “The rise of NEETs (not in education, employment or training) is a sign of deeper systemic problems, where the education system, job market and economic structures are failing to support young people’s transition into productive employment, thus creating present and future fertile ground for inevitable social conflict.”
The employment crisis becomes even more consequential when viewed through the lens of gender. One of the book’s most striking arguments is that improving women’s access to education has not translated straightforwardly into greater access to employment. The authors describe these women as “discouraged potential workers who wish to work but cannot find work”, pointing to the “dearth of quality and decent job opportunities in both the service and industrial sectors”. More than a problem of skills, this situation exposes a deeper failure in the transition from education to work, where acquiring qualifications does not necessarily create an economic pathway through which women can turn them into livelihoods. The demographic dividend, in this sense, cannot simply be about having more young people or educating more girls. It depends on whether the economy can actually create meaningful opportunities for them to participate in it.
Ultimately, India Out of Work asks us to reconsider what India’s growth story ought to mean. An economy cannot claim the promise of transformation while large sections of its population remain unable to find productive, secure and dignified work. The crisis the authors map is therefore not confined to unemployment. It runs through education, gender, informality, wages and the stalled movement of workers into more productive sectors, exposing the widening distance between economic growth and the lives it is expected to improve. Their insistence on faster growth and large-scale job creation may remain firmly within the language of economic expansion, but the questions they raise are difficult to evade. Growth matters precisely because of what it makes possible for people. If it cannot provide young people with meaningful work, women with genuine opportunities for economic participation, and workers with a pathway out of precarity, then the problem is not simply that India is growing without enough jobs. It is that the meaning of growth itself needs to be reconsidered.