Ø By Mr.Ankit Shyamsukha, CEO, ICA Edu
Skills & Co-founder, IDCM
Over the past one year, our economy has been
going through a slowdown and people are losing their jobs. If we see the unemployment
rate of our national capital, Delhi, it has increased by 17 percent in the last
eight months. This dismal trend is observed across the country with
participation of women declining each passing month. According to the experts,
the situation is set to go further downhill because of the unavailability of a
comprehensive job retention programme. On the top of that, the current rise in
COVID-19 cases represents a threat to the livelihood of thousands of workers as
57% of India’s total population has been forced to remain indoors due to the
lockdown or strict curfews in many of the states.
A latest report from Centre for Monitoring Indian
Economy (CMIE) suggested that salaried jobs across India registered a sharp
decline in 2020-21 to the tune of 9.8 million. India had a total of 85.9
million salaried jobs in 2019-20 which, by the end of March 2021, reduced to
76.2 million. The surge in COVID cases also signifies that the salaried job
loss will be more in the urban areas in the coming years. The situation in
rural areas would be the same or worse as small cities and its adjoining areas
are more affected than in 2020 and this is certainly disturbing the overall
employment scenario in the rural areas. The CMIE report further added that
people who have lost jobs in rural areas migrated to farming.
However pandemic isn’t the only reason of
salaried job loss in India, there are other factors behind the ongoing job
crisis in India:
Strained
Businesses
The coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent
lockdowns and strict curfews have impacted the business in a big way as the
movement of goods has been restricted. Entrepreneurs are in a big fix because
there is no clarity on when the lockdown will be subsided. As the cases are
rising and the virus is mutating at a very fast pace, the lockdown is also
getting extended in order to curb the further spread and reduce the death rate.
Besides a selected few businesses, the majority of the enterprise's revenue
have crashed. Directly or indirectly, salary cut is leading to job loss in
every sector.
Voluntary
unemployment
It has been observed that a greater part of
people, who lost their job with the onset of the lockdown last year, haven’t
taken up a new job due to the uncertainty and the fear of the COVID pandemic.
This is also one of the reasons behind the rising instances of unemployment in
our country. We are hopeful of the fact that when the vaccination coverage will
be extended then the fresh streak of antibodies will kick in and unemployment
rate will be dipped significantly.
The rising entrepreneurship wave
Few years ago, India witnessed a fresh new wave of
entrepreneurship and many people have left their salaried jobs to be a part of
this trend. The reason behind this transition could be people were not
experiencing growth in salaried jobs in the country. In our country, salaried
jobs do not seem to grow in tandem with economic growth, or even with an
increase in entrepreneurship. But, this is evident that they are suffering the
most during the current economic meltdown. Data also represents the fact that
despite India’s rapid growth before 2019, salaried jobs grew at a snail’s pace.
Salaried jobs grew from 21.2 per cent in 2016-17 to just 21.6 per cent in
2017-18. It inches to 21.9 per cent in 2018-19. In FY20, India had over 7.8
crore entrepreneurs compared to the salaried jobs, which remained steady at 8.6
crore. Even the whopping 63 million MSMEs in India have been heavily impacted
and they have not yet been overcome from the losses. Since there is an extreme
pressure to revive their business, it’s also contributing to the job loss
scenario.
The urban job meltdown
It has been seen that the farmers and daily wage
earners ratio in India is more as compared to the salaried jobs. Farmers and
daily wage earners constitute two-thirds of the Indian working population. This
shows Indians are more comfortable in getting informal jobs, where it is
comparatively easier to get jobs. However, such form of employment heavily
depends on demand originating from the urban economy, comprising mostly
salaried jobs. But, when the sudden meltdown of salaried jobs happened in
India, the informal economy also affected by it leaving thousands of
small-scale traders shutting their shops. The rural economy stood stable during
the economic meltdown resulting from the sudden lockdowns.
Way
forward
However, a plethora of new opportunities has come
up as the vaccination drive has been extended to the youth age group as well.
It’s time to explore new job opportunities with new age skills as banking,
finance and fintech have emerging job opportunities. We need to bridge the
skilling gap by identifying what all skills are needed to upgrade yourself in
order to stay more relevant in today’s job market. Here, job-oriented training
institutes play a pivotal role in producing industry-ready professionals in
marketing, accounting, taxation, blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine
learning and data analytics.
No comments:
Post a Comment