Centre for Sustainable Employment
Generating and supporting research in the areas of job creation, employment, and sustainable livelihoods.
India is facing a severe crisis of employment and livelihoods. Economic growth has failed to generate secure, regular, and decent incomes for the vast majority. We look for fresh thought that is anchored in the real world and imaginative on the right of every Indian to lead a secure dignified life.
The vision is decent work and regular incomes for all; an India where every person who is willing and able to contribute to our economy can do so while earning a secure income equal to at least the salary that a lowest paid regular government employee receives.
Our initiatives
1. Report on the State of Working India:
An evidence-based overview on employment in the Indian economy.
- Why has growth in India failed to create decent livelihoods?
- What are the obstacles to reaching universal employment?
- What are the connections between growth, inequality, and employment?
- What is the status of skills among the Indian workforce?
- Why are some labour markets loose and some tight?
- Why is there a mismatch between college education and employability?
- Which states have succeeded in creating good jobs and why?
2. Data and Infographics Platform
A bird’s eye view of labour statistics in India
We host data and analysis as well as the latest available information on jobs, incomes, labour force participation, and other relevant parameters.
3. Working Paper Series
A series on labour, jobs, and employment
Focus areas
Some of our focus areas are listed below.
Most Indian states are major economies in their own right and differ widely in their economic performance. This diversity offers an opportunity to compare and contrast experiences in employment generation and creation of decent jobs. We will conduct State-specific studies and studies comparing different states, offering an opportunity to learn from successful employment experiences.
India is home to the largest youth population in the world. Creating gainful employment for the growing workforce is a priority if the ‘demographic dividend’ is to be reaped. Yet, in recent years, despite sustained economic growth, the Indian economy has failed to generate adequate jobs. The majority of the population continue to be employed in agriculture while contributing to only a quarter of the nation’s GDP.
In this context, the creation of jobs that are productive, sustainable and decent is imperative. Financial globalisation and consequently greater access to capital for domestic firms has had implications for job creation in the country. We will examine reasons for the inability of India’s growing economy to create productive and decent jobs while identifying potential sectors and activities that could lead job creation in the future.
Recently there has been a lot of anxiety around the lack of skilled labour in India. While public policy has renewed focus on skill generation and providing vocational training, there exists very little data on the effectiveness of these interventions. On the other hand there is very little official recognition of informal and historically acquired skills as viable means for generating sustainable employment. We build the case for taking informal skills seriously while at the same time improving the quality of formal skill creation institutions
An understanding of the labour market in India requires moving beyond statistics in order to consider qualitative dimensions of work as well. These include physical conditions of work environments, the nature of employment arrangements in terms of security and dignity of work.
Post-liberalisation, in response to global demand for flexible and just-in-time production models, alternative work arrangements emerged allowing for workers to be hired and fired easily, with minimum or no social security benefits. Consequently, formal jobs which are accompanied by some security of tenure, and/or social security benefits have contracted.
Instead, informal jobs, i.e. precarious jobs without basic social security support, have multiplied, both in the unorganised and organised sector. On the one hand, these jobs allow flexibility for enterprises and workers. On the other hand, it makes work precarious, unregulated and insecure.
Acknowledging the importance of considering qualitative aspects of work, our work will draw from multiple disciplines including economics, political economy, sociology and development studies.
Agriculture continues to be the predominant sector of employment, accounting for almost half the labour force. At the same time, it contributes to less than a quarter of GDP indicating low productivity work and disguised unemployment.
While the services sector is an important employer, most jobs are informal and vulnerable. Most service sector enterprises are small-scale, own account enterprises with limits to productivity.
Manufacturing and construction have emerged as important employers, yet the nature of work is often precarious and in abysmal conditions. Manufacturing is identified in government policy as a major employer – Make in India – yet this sector has seen increase in capital intensity as well as the rise of informal contract-based employment arrangements. These will be some of the broad themes that sectoral studies that we will focus on.
Legislation regulating the hiring and firing of workers, working conditions, benefits, and other aspects of the capital-labour relationship is at the centre of the debate around “jobless growth.” A multiplicity of laws, overlapping regulatory institutions, and costs of enforcement are often cited as the reason for poor employment creation.
On the other hand, most of India’s labour force is in informal employment outside the ambit of labour laws. Are labour laws an important constraint for job creation? If so, in which sectors? Our work will examine the broad implications of labour laws incorporating considerations of political economy and governance, while also focusing on specific cases in selected sectors or regions.
People
Director
Research fellows
Publications
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Article
Structural Transformation and Employment Generation in India: Past Performance and the Way Forward
Historical experience suggests that a sustained rise in per capita incomes and improvement in employment conditions is not attainable without a structural transformation that moves surplus labour from agriculture and other informal economic activities to higher productivity activities in the non-farm economy. In this paper,…
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Working Paper Series
Who was Impacted and How? | COVID-19 Pandemic and the Long Uneven Recovery in India
We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income levels, poverty, and inequality in both the immediate aftermath and during the long uneven recovery till December 2021 using high-frequency household survey data from India. We find that the average all-India household income dropped between…
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Working Paper Series
Did the nation-wide implementation of e‑FMS in MGNREGS result in reduced expenditures? A re-examination of the evidence
This paper revisits a part of the analysis by Banerjee et al. (2020), in which they examine the consequences of the nation-wide scale up of reforms to the funds management system (e‑FMS) in India’s national workfare programme, using a two-way fixed effects specification. They report…
How Comparable are India’s Labour Market Surveys?
Rosa Abraham, Anand Shrivastava (2023)Labour incomes in India: A comparison of PLFS and CMIE-CPHS data
Amit Basole (2022)State of Working India 2021: One year of Covid-19
Centre for Sustainable Employment (2023)State of Working India 2018
Amit Basole, Arjun Jayadev, Rosa Abraham (2018)Microenterprises in India: A Multidimensional Analysis
Amit Basole (2019)State of Working India 2019
Amit Basole (2019)