India is one of the world’s fastest growing economies. To be a stable and prosperous democracy, this growth must be accompanied by the creation of meaningful, secure and remunerative employment. Realising this goal requires a grounded and comprehensive overview of the state of labour markets, employment generation, demographic challenges and the nature of growth.

The State of Working India (SWI) is envisioned as a regular publication that delivers well-researched, analytically useful information on India’s labour market, by bringing together researchers, journalists, civil society activists, and policymakers interested in labour and employment issues.

The report is based on the research of CSE staff, as well as on background papers which are available online. SWI conceives of India’s ongoing structural transformation as composed of two processes — movement of workers from agriculture to non-farm occupations (the Kuznets process) and from informal activities to formal ones (the Lewis process). But it adds crucial considerations of social equity and ecological sustainability to this standard framework. In the 21^st century, Lewis and Kuznets have to meet Ambedkar and Gandhi.

Report Documents

• Complete Report (PDF) Corrigendum
• All Figures (PDF)
• Figure Data (XLS)
• Appendix Tables (XLS)
• Media Coverage
• Background Papers
• Individual Chapters:
  • Cover And TOC
  • Executive Summary (Hindi version)
  • Chapter One : Introduction
  • Chapter Two : Who Is Looking For Work?
  • Chapter Three : Where Is the Work?
  • Chapter Four: How Good Is The Work
  • Chapter Five: Who Does The Work
  • Chapter Six : Conclusion
  • Methods
  • Bibliography

Volume 7 Issue 3: The November issue has beaten the nay-sayers at their own game with articles that celebrate the joy of doing mathematics through games, stories, applications of mathematics and activities on line and in the classroom. 

Explore the ​‘Evolution’ of stars, the Earth, life, and humans through three articles for our adult readers and one short story written for young adults. 

In ​‘Annals of History’ relive the contentious process of arriving at the unexpected mathematical pattern that has become key to our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. 

Read ​‘Research to Practice’, ​‘The Science Educator at Work’ and ​‘Teaching as if the Earth Matters’ to see how complex concepts related to energy, evolution and soil can be taught through metaphors, art and real-world experiences. 

Learn more about Lynn Margulis’s ​‘controversial’ ideas and life in science in ​‘Biography of a Scientist’. If you’d like more, try some simple classroom experiments from ​‘The Science Lab’ to understand foundational principles in Physics. 

Use the seven activity sheets from ​‘Life in your Backyard’ to introduce your students to the fascinating world of spiders. Plus, enjoy our nine pull-out posters on themes as diverse as ​‘Benthic Fauna’, ​‘The Hard Problem of Consciousness’, and ​‘Ocean Acidification’.

Education initiatives are part of governments all across the globe, guided by a much-deliberated system of principles influencing decisions that are aimed at achieving pre-determined outcomes, which, in turn, are perceived to be beneficial to a particular country’s goals. Much thought goes on behind creating initiatives: they are statements of intent and, equally, the task of implementation is a very complex one. Not just that, innovative education initiatives have the huge additional responsibility of creating and shaping future generations, who, in turn, are any country’s future. The initiatives have to keep in mind the cultural and social norms of the country, while creating the atmosphere for salutary change. Another aspect that has to be taken into account while designing innovative government initiatives in education is the changes in society and its demands, both locally and globally, and rethink their strategies in order to benefit a new and contemporary scenario which will equip children to face and handle challenges of current times.

Volume 7 Issue 2: And it’s out! Most of you would have already received your copy of the July issue of At Right Angles, here’s the official announcement and the link with the welcome news that AtRiA is finally a whole school math resource! The shift all the way to Primary is marked with several new sub-sections in ClassRoom: from Sense-Making in Mathematics – the cover says it all- to TearOut- where all a busy teacher has to do is to tear out a ready made worksheet – complete with facilitator notes- and use it to challenge students to think in fun mathematical ways. As always, PullOut shares strategies and tips on a specific theme, this time we continue our series on Algebra.

And to top it all, we have not one but two students contributing articles to the Features section, no less! Enjoy a great read!

Author:

• Anumeha Yadav

A striking feature of the Indian economy has been the relatively small contribution made by the manufacturing sector to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, more importantly, to employment. In 2013, manufacturing accounted for only 16.5 per cent of India’s GDP, compared to 29.7 per cent of China’s.3 According to the National Sample Survey (NSS) on Employment and Unemployment, India’s manufacturing sector provided employment to 61.3 million in 2011-12, which was only 13 per cent of the country’s total workforce of 472.5 million in that year.

Authors:

• Jayan Jose Thomas
• Chinju Johny

This study is the outcome of the experience of the Shramajivi Mahila Samity, an independent, non-party mass organisation of mainly rural working women in West Bengal. Shramajivi Mahila Samity works on gender discrimination and rights of women. It does not run any direct income generating programmes. However, in the 28 years of our work in rural Bengal, we have seen women contributing in myriad ways to the economies of their families. They are an irreplaceable element in the survival of their families, often making the difference between starvation and subsistence. We have always been surprised by the official statistics which show West Bengal as having one of the lowest female labour participation rates in the country. It has led us to believe that there is a gross misunderstanding about women’s work and the importance of unpaid work in the economy of a poor household. In the past few decades, we have seen more and more women in rural Bengal joining paid work. We have seen that men are migrating and the agricultural labour force in many areas consists now almost entirely of women. We were therefore surprised to read about a debate on falling female labour particpation rate at the national level. It did not match our own work experiences. It has led us to the present study, which we hope will be able to shed some light on what is actually happening to women from the rural working class in West Bengal.

Author:

• Anuradha Talwar

In India, the relative importance of the handloom sector, one of the largest employers following agriculture, has been declining for last few decades. The All India Handloom Census data for the year 2009-10 however showed a rather modest decline in the number of weavers in West Bengal, in contrast to a 33% decline at the national level in the same year. But share of handloom income in total household income for the weaver households in the state has decreased significantly pointing to considerable occupational diversification among them. Based on a qualitative field study in three districts of West Bengal — namely, Hooghly, Nadia and Purba Bardhaman — this essay presents findings related to the condition of handloom weavers in West Bengal and in the light of the findings, examines two issues— intra-sector and inter-sector mobility of labour as well as weavers’ response to changing market conditions. The paper argues for a more labour-focused approach in place of currently dominant tradition-focused understanding of the sector.

Authors:

• Rajesh Bhattacharya
• Sarmishtha Sen

This study focuses on the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera-Bawal-Tapukara-Neemrana industrial belt in Haryana and Rajasthan, which is an important ​‘node’ or part of Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and a major destination of capital in the last few decades. The study is based on primary survey work of qualitative nature of over 6 months from September 2017 to March 2018. Primary respondents are workers of different segments, plant-level Trade Union leaders and Trade Union activists of the belt, with some inputs from secondary literature, workers magazine and data published by the companies and the government.

Authors:

• Amit
• Nayanjyoti

After independence in 1947, India embarked on an ambitious path of industrialisation, following the standard modern developmental prescription drawn from the experience of the so-called developed countries. Since the inauguration of the reform era in 1991, this model of development, duly globalised, has been reinforced by the decisions made by metropolitan policy elites both within and beyond India.

Author:

• Aseem Shrivastava

Domestic workers (henceforth, DW), are a part of the large ​‘informal’ sector of urban economy and society in India.ii According to the NSSO data, over the last two decades, the DW populationiii has emerged as the second largest urban informal workforce (Chen and Raveendran 2011), next only to ​‘home based workers’ (artisans and petty commodity producers). According to the NSS 68^th round (July 2011- June 2012), it is estimated that 41.3 lakhs workers work in the households of others, and an overwhelming 27.9 lakhs of this total are women.iv An increasing number of studies are emerging about DWs around the world including the phenomenon of international migration of DWs for work. This paper is a critical commentary on the collectivization of DWs, based upon an ongoing empirical study that combines ethnographic and quantitative inquiry among DWs in different parts of Bengaluru, India. Our aim here is to provide readers with general insights into some of the key struggles of and prospects for domestic workers in a particular context – DWs who work in a mega-city and in multiple homes (rather than as live-ins).

Authors:

• Balmurli Natrajan
• Rajesh Joseph

The policy framework in India has provided support to the micro and small enterprises. In 2006, the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Act 2006 came into existence (msme​.gov​.in). This Act aimed at promoting and developing micro, small and medium enterprises. In India, the MSME sector’s contribution to GDP was 17 percent of GDP during 2004-05 to 2009-10. More recently, a comprehensive policy called the National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015 came into existence. This policy supersedes the National Skill Development Policy of 2009. The vision statement of the policy is ​“To create an ecosystem of empowerment by Skilling on a large Scale at Speed with high Standards and to promote a culture of innovation based entrepreneurship which can generate wealth and employment so as to ensure Sustainable livelihoods for all citizens in the country.” Recent policies such as demonetization and implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) have created a setback for the micro enterprises that operated in the informal economy based mainly on cash transactions.

Authors:

• Jeemol Unni
• Ravikiran Naik

Despite its weak performance in terms of job creation in recent years, the organised manufacture sector remains vital to employment policy. This paper investigates the aggregate trends in this sector, in employment, output, labour-capital ratio, as well as wage share and wage rates at the three-digit NIC level over a long period from 1983 to 2016 using the Annual Survey of Industries data. We show that three distinct sub-periods can be identified within the overall period. Further, using shift-share decomposition we show that most of the decline in the L/K ratio can be explained by within industry changes. Finally, we analyze industries with respect to their capacity to deliver job growth as well as wage growth.

Authors:

• Amit Basole
• Amay Narayan

Preponderance of small (that is, less than 10 workers) sized manufacturing establishments in India is said to reject their inability to growth in size on account of prohibitive cost of regulatory compliance (and the associated corruption). Similarly, the ​“U” shaped (or bi-modal) distribution of manufacturing employment by size of establishment or enterprise – popularly termed the ​“missing middle” – is argued to be the outcome of the rigid labour laws, adversely a acting productivity growth. Do the foregoing propositions represent hard facts, or artefacts of mis-measurement and misinterpretation of the evidence? The paper contends that it is the latter: the observed employment distribution by size is more likely to reject the widespread and growing evasion of o3cial registration, and under-reporting or mis-representation in the administrative data. Further, the wide schism observed between the organised (formal) and unorganised (informal) labour markets represents persistence of surplus labour, and organisational dualism – à la Hella Myint — on account of technology and organisation of production in the modern sector; and perhaps not on account of policy induced rigidities in the labour market, as many contend.

Author:

• R.Nagaraj

This paper attempts to explore the avenues for future jobs given the impact of technology in the form of internet of things, robots, cloud computing, nano technology, automization of manufacturing etc. and the measures in place to address these challenges. The paper explores the labour market from the supply side, the demographic advantage that India has along with the constraints involved in converting the advantage into a dividend. The demographic spread of the labour force is geographically different in that the South we have an ageing workforce with longer life expectancy while in the North and Central India the new entrants to the labour market is the youth. The demographic advantage is concentrated in the North. This is then addressed against the backdrop of the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on jobs and the skill gaps that exist in addressing them. The skill gap therefore needs to be addressed differently. While the policy focus is on skilling/up-skilling and re-skilling the emphasis of each of these components differ according to the geographical spread of the demographic advantage. There should be continuous upgrading of the training curriculum to incorporate the technological advancements. More number of youth should be motivated to opt for vocational courses that enhance their skill set and employability to enable India convert its demographic advantage into dividend.

Author:

• A. Srija

Analyses of the Indian labour market have been been characterized by the lack of recognition of one major fallacy or myth, two looming crises, and a silent tragedy resulting from unrealized expectations. The fallacy is that 12 mn join the Indian labour force every year, looking for work. The first of the two looming crisis is that millions need and wish to agriculture behind in search of non-agricultural work, but at least since 2011-12 they are not finding enough work to pull them away from agriculture. The second looming crisis is that youth are joining the age group of 14+ in growing numbers, each year with higher and higher levels of education, and are not finding nonagricultural work – despite their aspiration being only for such work. The final concern, which is simmering rather than reached the ​‘ready-to-boil-over’ stage, is the sub-group of the second looming crisis of youth who are getting better educated, is for girls who have reached gender parity in secondary education, and hence aspire for nonagricultural work. All three categories of workers have plenty among them who are disheartened workers, for whom there are too few non-agricultural opportunities.

Author:

• Santosh Mehrotra

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides 100 days of work in a year for every rural household at a minimum wage. Because of MGNREGA, for the first time in the country, a transaction-based management information system (MIS) has been made available in the public domain, a feather in the cap of transparency. An essential safeguard in MGNREGA is delay compensation to be paid when workers do not receive wages within 15 days of completion of work. Despite several attempted measures, payment delays are rampant and the method of calculating delay compensation is flawed leading to massive under-calculation of the true payable compensation. By analysing over 90 lakh transactions for the financial year 2016 – 2017 across 10 states, we observe that only 21% of the payments were made on time and the central government alone was taking an average of over 50 days to electronically transfer wages. On aggregate, in our sample, while the true total delay compensation payable is about Rs. 36 crores, only about Rs. 15.6 crores is being calculated in the MIS. The Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) has acknowledged the correctness of the findings and the Supreme Court of India has also issued Orders to the MoRD based on these findings.

Authors:

• Rajendran Narayanan
• Sakina Dhorajiwala
• Rajesh Golani

The policymakers, particularly on the right side of the aisle, have traditionally stigmatized any form of environmental regulations, as being a detrimental practice, which raises the cost of production, disproportionately affects the small businesses, and imposes expenses on the economy that tend to stifle economic growth and cut levels of employment (Murphy et al. [2015]). So, what this argument does is to essentially juxtapose environmental regulations against the growth and job opportunities in any economy. In the specific context of developing countries, this raises serious concerns about any environmental regulations as these economies are already reeling under problems of severe unemployment and poverty. Therefore, any discussion on clean energy in the context of a developing economy is usually taken with a grain of salt since it somehow tends to generate a feeling among the politicians as well as the policymakers that it will inflict hardships on the economy.

Authors:

• Rohit Azad
• Shouvik Chakraborty

Volume 7 Issue 1: This issue of AtRiA welcomes you to the Math Village. Where house numbers, rangoli patterns, piles of fruit and even a child’s amusement device speaks to the instictive mathematician in each of us.

Read about these in Triangular Numbers in Features and the House Number Problem in ClassRoom. Appropriately, many of these problems were prompted by Ramanujan in his village. The Review is of a book which was used to teach a pre-course at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University and it syncs perfectly with the theme of finding mathematics in the most unexpected places.

Hone up on how to create a Conjecturing ClassRoom or generate Elementary Cellular Automata! Misconceptions in Fractions and an analysis of common errors in Algebra give an insight into students’ struggles with mathematics and the PullOut, too, focuses on Algebra and how to make a seamless move from Arithmetic to Algebra.

It is different for each one of us which is why when people reminisce about their school, opinions can differ about the same subject or teacher. The teacher, for her part, also has unique relationships with the class she goes to. It is a dynamic, organic process. The same concern, involvement and thoughtfulness that was evident in the experiences recounted in the first part are present in the narratives of this Issue too.

There has been substantial recent interest in the decline of labour shares across countries. For the most part, attention has been focused on developed countries. We examine the evolution of India’s labour share in its formal industrial sector from 1983- 2016. Using two datasets corresponding to sectoral aggregate data and plant-level data respectively, we document a secular decline in the labour share across all sectors from 1983, with a stabilisation at very low levels (around 8 to 10 percent) starting around 2005. We then use the plant-level data to identify correlates that illuminate reasons for the overall decline in the labour share. We find strong evidence to support multiple causes: increased capital intensity, greater informalisation, greater privatisation, and productivity increases in larger firms. As such, we suggest that the declines in labour share experienced are due to a composite set of factors. Conversely, other potential explanations (e.g. regional variation in the labour share) have less explanatory power.

Authors:

• Arjun Jayadev
• Amay Narayan

The challenge of employment in the Indian economy, especially after it growth acceleration since the mid-1980s, relates to its quality rather than its quantity. While employment growth has kept pace with the labour force over the long run, what has grown is informal employment. The coexistence of rapid capital accumulation, robust output growth and lack of growth of formal employment can be understood using the well-known Harris-Todaro model of a dual economy. This framework highlights the key role of the wage gap between the modern and traditional sectors as a determinant of urban informal employment. Hence, one of the most effective and egalitarian ways to address the employment problem is to adopt policies to increase agricultural productivity and income, which can reduce the wage gap. Since crop yields in India are far lower than many other countries in the world, including China, Brazil, and Bangladesh, there is ample scope for land-augmenting and labour-absorbing technological change in Indian agriculture. Efforts to ramp up industrialization should be taken up in earnest only after the wage gap has been narrowed significantly.

Author:

• Deepankar Basu

India’s overall economic performance over the last fifteen years has been outstanding, with the economy growing at an average of over 7% p.a. Growth has been service-led with the services sector accounting for over 60% of GDP growth over the period. Importantly, India’s structural transformation has been marked by a shift straight from agriculture to services led growth, leapfrogging manufacturing. The problem with this pattern of growth has been that it has generated relatively fewer opportunities of employment generation. The role of the manufacturing sector, ordinarily considered to be an important engine of growth and job creation for low and middle income countries, has been rather limited. Its share in total GDP and employment has continued to hover around 15% and 12% respectively for the last three decades.

Author:

• Radhicka Kapoor