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Employment issues have always been among the priorities of the GoI. As it is considered the best tool to alleviate poverty, the area gets even more importance. The latest employment scenario12 and related concerns are as given below:
• The overall employment increased by 1.35 lakh—contributed by the IT/BPOs, textiles including apparels and metals sectors. However, the sectors such as gems & jewellery, handloom & power loom, leather, automobiles and transport saw decline in employment.
• Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) was estimated at 50.3 per cent
— for females 23.7 per cent and males 75.0 per cent. The North Eastern and Southern States, in general, display high female LFPR as compared to low levels in Northern States.
• Unemployment rate for females
(8.7 per cent) was higher than that of males (4.0 per cent) across rural and urban areas—with wide inter-state variations as seen in case of the LFPR.
• Employment growth has been sluggish. Further, States that show low unemployment rates also generally rank high in the share of manufacturing. While States compete to seek investment offering incentives, linking incentives to the number of jobs created, sustained efforts need to be considered as a tool to increase employment.
• There is a clear shift in employment to secondary and tertiary sectors from the primary sector. The growth in employment by category reflects increase in both casual labour and contract workers. This has adverse implications on the level of wages, stability of employment, social security of employees owing to the ‘temporary’ nature of employment. It also indicates preference by employers away from regular/formal employment to circumvent labour laws.
• The multiplicity of labour laws and the difficulty in their compliance have been an impediment to the industrial development and employment generation.
The conventional employment and unemployment surveys have not been able to capture the various types of unpaid work that women engage in both within and outside households in rural and urban areas in India. Globally, men’s share in paid work is around 1.8 times that of women, while women have a share three times that of men in unpaid work. Therefore, paid work which is visible and accounted for by the System of National Accounts (SNA) is dominated by men, while unpaid work which is not accounted for is dominated by women and remains unrecognised and unaccounted for.
Valuing unpaid work is important since women’s work gets subsumed under several types of activities. A TUS (Time Use Survey) was conducted in India in six select states on a pilot basis from July 1998 to June 1999. The results of the survey revealed the hidden contribution of women to the economy—
(i) Out of 168 hours in a week, males on an average spent about 42 hours in SNA-captured activities as compared to only about 19 hours by females. However, in the extended SNA activities, women spent 34.6 hours which included unpaid work at home and outside, as opposed to only about 3.6 hours by men.
(ii) The declining female participation rates in conventional surveys are largely explained by the high share of women in unpaid work. Based on the findings of the pilot TUS, the NCATUS (National Classification of Activities for Time Use Studies), which also provides a classification of unpaid activities that is crucial for capturing the various activities of women in the economy, has been developed.