India's rosy unemployment figures -- which show that only ameasly 6.6 percent of Indian workers are out of a job -- belies the grimreality of the job market here, suggests a statistics-rich article in anational newspaper.
This is a country where 20,000 people show up to apply whenthe state police announces it will hire 2,000 new beat cops, where the joblesscan be seen loitering on corners at every hour of the day on every street inevery city, and where young men are known to turn to performance boostingdrugs... to make it into the army.
What explains the contradiction? Having a job doesn't meanmuch, if the job doesn't employ you for the whole day or the whole year or itdoesn't pay you enough to survive.
According to stats quoted by the newspaper, nearly 30million Indians are unemployed, 26 million are officially underemployed, 40million want additional work and 35 million are looking for a better job -- andmost folks consider those figures to be gross understatements.
Here's why:
Being employed alone doesn't guarantee an escape frompoverty, mostly because so few of the "jobs" are in the formalsector, where workers are guaranteed the legal minimum wage.
As the newspaper puts it:
When compared with other Brics countries, it's clear whereIndia lags. Among these five emerging economies, China is the only one whereindustry has a larger GDP share than services. Yet, services employ one-thirdof the Chinese workforce. In Brazil, services constitute 65% of GDP and givejobs to 61% of the workforce. The corresponding figures for Russia are 58% ofGDP and 62% of the workforce. Similarly, in South Africa employment generationin services is higher than income from the sector. Services constitute 63% ofSouth African GDP while the sector employs 70% of the country's workforce.
Lack of skills in India also forces workers to remaintrapped in the unorganized sector, doing menial and semi-skilled work. About93% of India's workforce is in the informal sector. The majority of thesepeople work in pitiable conditions, lacking basic labour standards like awritten job contract, paid leave, social security and access to tradeunions.
