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.
Research Programme 2022 (1 July 2022- 30 June 2023)
Sl. No. | Name of the study | Name of the Researcher(s) (PI/Co PI) and the Institution(if any) | Grant amount (in INR) |
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1 | Skilling Youth of Goa: An Assessment of the Short-Term Training under PMKVY 2.0 | Prakash Singh, Goa Institute of Management | 5,99,500 |
2 | Impact of COVID induced permanent reverse migration on women’s labour market opportunities in rural India | Stutilina Pal, SRIJAN | 10,00,000 |
3 | How are handloom weavers using digital technology and skills to innovate and adapt their knowledge practices for craft futures? | Abismrita Chakravarty, Independent Researcher | 5,00,000 |
4 | Industrial estates in Kashmir and the everyday precariousness of working labour in a conflict zone | Elizabeth Mariam, Independent Researcher | 7,15,000 |
5 | Evaluating Urban Wage Employment Initiative for Informal Sector Workers in Odisha | Rajkishor Mishra, Independent Researcher | 10,00,000 |
6 | Employment in the Care Sector in India : Assessing the Coverage Gap of Care Service Provisions | Prachi Bansal, Independent Researcher | 10,00,000 |
7 | Impact of hiring and firing laws on factor productivity: A unit level analysis using judicial outcome Index | Irfan Sofi, Islamic University of Science and Technology, Awantipora, Jammu and Kashmir | 6,00,000 |
8 | Livelihood and Gender in the Urban Space: The Case of CSCs under Digital India Programme | Meenakshi Rajeev, Institute for Social and Economic Change | 9,00,000 |
9 | Impact of legal discrimination on female economic participation outcomes across Indian states | Bhuvana Anand, Trayas Foundation | 9,99,900 |
10 | Public transport policies and women’s mobility in Indian cities | Rishi Kumar, BITS Pilani-Hyderabad Campus | 9,99,600 |
11 | Inter-State Migration of Workers in India: Its Magnitude, Impacts, and the Way Forward | Jayan Jose Thomas, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi New Delhi | 7,98,600 |
Research Programme 2020 (1 July 2020- 30 June 2021)
Sl. No. | Name of the study | Name of the Researcher(s) (PI/Co PI) and the Institution(if any) | Grant amount (in INR) |
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1 | Informal employment in India: Dynamics, Determinants and Welfare Implications | Vidya Mahambare, Great Lakes Institute of Management | 5,79,700 |
2 | Assessing the impact of the DDU-GKY scheme on the lives of migrant women workers in the Gurgaon garment industry | Rakhi Sehgal, AR Associates | 11,99,999 |
3 | Impact of COVID-19 on existing livelihood of Mahila Arthik Vikas Mahamandal (MAVIM) run SHG’s with respect to Urban settings of Maharashtra and Designing Opportunities to cope with the New Normal | Kusum Balsaraf, Mahila Arthik Vikas Mahamandal | 12,00,000 |
4 | Distaste for Minority Bosses: Discrimination from Below and Its Economic Consequences in Indian Labor Markets | Chinmaya Kumar, Independent Researcher | 9,21,000 |
5 | The Effect of COVID-19 and Related State Interventions on Informal Labour Markets in India | Sujatha Srinivasan, Institute for Financial Management and Research | 11,99,181 |
6 | Let Them Eat Rice | Aparna Karthikeyan, CounterMedia Trust | 7,15,000 |
7 | Labour Supply Chains in the Construction Industry: Circular Migrants, Contracting, and Covid | Aardra Surendran, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad | 10,70,300 |
Research Programme 2019 (1 July 2019- 30 June 2020)
Sl. No. | Name of the study | Name of the Researcher(s) (PI/Co PI) and the Institution(if any) | Grant amount (in INR) |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Expansion of Social Security and Labour Standards in the Organised Sector in India | Ravi Srivastava, Institute for Human Development | 16,69,000 |
2 | Understanding the Sociology of Declining Rural Female Labour Force Participation Rate in India | Soundarya Iyer, French Institute of Pondicherry | 20,00,000 |
3 | Archiving Living Residue of a Lost World: Medieval City’s Pre-Modern Occupations in Post Modern Times | Uzma Azhar, Independent researcher | 14,71,000 |
4 | Online and offline livelihoods: An analysis of the impact of the gig economy on worker participation | Varadharajan Sridhar, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore | 19,55,800 |
5 | Employability of people who have completed training and apprenticeship with ITIs in Maharashtra: 2014 to 2017 | John Almeida, Institute for Community Organisation Research | 16,36,000 |
6 | Skill Gap and Unemployment among Educated Indian Youth: A Comparative Study of Job Market Entrants in Bihar and Telangana | Krithi S, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad | 8,85,500 |
Research Programme 2018 (1 July 2018- 30 June 2019)
Sl. No. | Name of the study | Name of the Researcher(s) (PI/Co PI) and the Institution(if any) | Grant amount (in INR) |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Understanding the Puzzle of Declining Female Labour Force Participation in India | Aparajita Dasgupta, Ashoka University | 12,94,200 |
2 | Wage Rates in Rural India: Trends and Determinants | Arindam Das, Foundation for Agrarian Studies | 14,00,000 |
3 | Women’s Employment, Interstate Variations and Time-use: A Comparative Study of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh | Bheemeshwar Reddy / Sunny Jose G, Birla Institute of Technology & Science-Pilani, Hyderabad Campus | 11,88,000 |
4 | Agrarian Question and the Transition of Rural Labour in India | Yadu C R, Independent researcher | 2,62,000 |
5 | Mapping Digital Labor in India | Sumandro Chattapadhyay, kusum | 15,00,000 |
6 | Study Labour Market in India | Pratibha Joshi, IFMR | 17,99,655 |
Research Programme 2016 (1 July 2016- 30 June 2017)
Sl. No. | Name of the study | Name of the Researcher(s) (PI/Co PI) and the Institution(if any) | Grant amount (in INR) |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Labour Addas: Negotiating With Informality | Harsh Mander, Centre for Equity Studies | 19,99,830 |
2 | Skills Development, Social Mobility And Educational Change : A Sociological Analysis Of The Effects Of The National Policy On Skills Development In India | Maithreyi, Shruti Padmanabhan, Niveditha Menon & Jyotsna Jha, Centre for Budget and Policy Studies | 20,92,500 |
People
Director
Research fellows
Publications
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Report
State of Working India 2023: Social Identities and Labour Market Outcomes
The Indian story of economic growth and structural transformation has been one of significant achievements as well as continuing challenges. On the one hand, the economy has grown rapidly since the 1980s, drawing millions of workers out of agriculture. And the proportion of salaried or…
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Working Paper Series
Estimating the productivity gap between organised and unorganised small-scale units in India’s manufacturing sector
Small manufacturing firms are considered to be engines of growth and job creation. While most research on small firms focuses on formal sector units, in India informal sector units far outnumber the formal. This is true even for manufacturing units employing 5 to 49 workers,…
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Working Paper Series
Labour market flows and gender differentials in urban unemployment over the pandemic
Utilising data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the researchers estimate quarterly changes in urban labour market flow over the period 2018 to 2022 and the impact on unemployment rates for men and women. Their analysis provides non-intuitive explanations for established findings as well as…
The Indian labour market through the lens of public sector recruitment
Centre for Sustainable Employment (2023)The impact of COVID-19 on Bengaluru’s Urban Poor
Amit Basole, Gaurav Gupta (2023)Loss, recovery and the long road ahead: Tracking India’s informal workers through the pandemic
Paaritosh Nath (2022)Structural Transformation and Employment Generation in India: Past Performance and the Way Forward
Amit Basole (2022)Who was Impacted and How? | COVID-19 Pandemic and the Long Uneven Recovery in India
Centre for Sustainable Employment (2022)Did the nation-wide implementation of e-FMS in MGNREGS result in reduced expenditures? A re-examination of the evidence
Centre for Sustainable Employment, School of Arts & Sciences (2023)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)
Events
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Report Release
Report Release | Delhi : State of Working India 2023
Release of State of Working India (SWI) 2023 followed by a panel discussion on “Social Identities and Labour Market Outcomes”
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Report Presentation
Report Presentation | Bengaluru : State of Working India 2023
Presentation of State of Working India (SWI) 2023 followed by a panel discussion
Note: We will be starting the event at the Bangalore International Centre at 6 PM instead of 5:30 PM as announced earlier.