Despite the BJP’s confidence in coming back to power with an even bigger mandate, the INDIA bloc is not letting the ruling coalition have a stroll to that goal. The opposition parties have made joblessness a big electoral issue, which the ruling party is not able to easily ward off. The Congress manifesto offered a detailed plan to improve the employment situation in the country. In comparison, the BJP, which released its manifesto this Sunday, has put out fewer specifics on job creation.
While the Congress’s focus is on filling 30 lakh government vacancies, the BJP has shied away from making any such announcement. The Congress has talked about jobs through small and medium enterprises, employment-linked incentives, and the launch of mining schemes with projected new jobs for 1.5 crore people. The BJP, on the other hand, has mostly promised creating a better environment for entrepreneurs and start-ups, who in turn would provide jobs; it has also talked about skilling the young to make them job-ready, but not much about where the jobs would come from.
Employment is an enormous challenge for a country where millions of young people enter the job market every year. Unemployment or underemployment is becoming both a political as well as a social problem in the country. An increasing number of experts are now convinced that overall growth alone would not create enough jobs in the economy. Growth is happening in the organised sector, not in the unorganised sector that employs 94 percent of Indians counted in the labour force.
The unorganised sector has faced several severe shocks since 2016—demonetisation, adjusting to the goods and services tax, the non-banking financial crisis and pandemic lockdowns. The country faces a challenge particularly in creating low-skilled jobs, which are mostly provided by labour-intensive sectors. However, with automation and mechanisation increasing at a fast pace, even those sectors that were considered labour-intensive are no longer generating enough jobs.
So policy makers and party think tanks need a rethink on jobs. Apart from the usual steps like creating a conducive environment for smaller players to do business and labour-intensive sectors to grow, the next government would do well to fill a large number of government vacancies. The government should support public education and health, which in turn can generate a large number of jobs. The services sector should also be seen as a generator of low-skilled jobs.