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DECODING THE FUTURE OF JOBS

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 1/21/2020 11:13:55 AM

PRABHAT LABH/ SOURAJIT AIYER Goal 8 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals looks at decent work and economic growth. One offshoot of this should be an improvement and sustained growth in the country’s state of jobs. But India is facing a unique challenge on this front, owing to a combination of evolving job opportunities across sectors, reduced employability due to the gaps between the education system and the dynamic changes in today’s workplace and deficient learning capabilities due to legacy nutrition challenges. Even though the NSSO data estimating India’s six per cent unemployment rate at a 45-year high was contested due to its narrow samplesize, the labour force participation rate and work participation rate (those in working-age looking for work and finding it, respectively) declined between 2012 and 2018, as per a paper by the Azim Premji University. The Grameen Foundation India’s (GFI’s) State of the Jobs in India report underscored the urgency to create jobs for over 15 million youth who are expected to enter the workforce each year. The question is which avenues can create net new jobs? A more enduring challenge is the fact that our educated workforce often lacks the requisite employability skills to meet the emerging demands of today’s jobs, be it on knowledge, competencies, technologies, processes, critical thinking and analytical abilities. Our archaic education pedagogy is not making our youth employable. This is causing a mismatch between aspirations and abilities, between income and consumption and a delay in realising India’s demographic dividend. The need to push the right skill set and education to meet the evolving nature of jobs is perhaps even more imminent. The investment in human capital for most of our population has been low from infancy which has caused legacy nutrition issues like stunting and undernutrition. Research suggests stunting and undernutrition impacts the brain’s development and thus abilities to learn new knowledge and skills which renders us unemployable. No quick-fix skill training can address this vexed issue. The GFI recently brought together corporates, policymakers, researchers, think-tanks, innovators, skill-developers, financiers, NGOs and the youth to deliberate on the current situation, identify trends and opportunities and seek the best recourse as the way forward. One priority was to address the issues surrounding the major employers of the workforce, i.e. agriculture and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). The discourse on these sectors often gets shadowed by the buzz surrounding start-ups and technology as the new engines of job growth; however, these two remain the mass employers. With net income growth from farming moving south — a minuscule growth of 0.44 per cent per annum between 2011 and 2016 as per a NITI Aayog paper — coupled with chronic debt due to expensive chemical inputs and natural phenomena like varying rainfall, floods and droughts, it is no surprise that sectoral employment declined by 27 million between 2012 and 2018. This is manifesting in mass migration from rural regions, led by youth. While the Government’s efforts to bridge the knowledge-gaps of new farming methods and technologies with extension and technical training have been in the right direction, there is a need to devise a reverse-migration strategy to bring back the youth to the farms. This can be done by incentivising low-cost, sustainable farming, setting up rural-based industries, facilitating farmer producer organisations (FPOs), ramping up social collateral-based rural credit, introducing technologies to scale up crop productivity, reduce damage, facilitate storage and transport and encourage the agri-entrepreneur ecosystem. That would also help revive the Bharat consumption story, a selling point of India’s growth story that has hit headwinds.