Context: 

Recently, the Indian Prime Minister distributed 51,000 appointment letters via video conferencing to newly inducted recruits as part of the Rozgar Mela (Employment Fair). 

• Since October last year, the government has been organizing these fairs to fill up the 10 lakh (or 1 million) existing vacancies in all types of government jobs before the general election of 2024.

Concerning Data on Unemployment in India: 

• As per Periodic Labour Force Survey, for 2017-18 the unemployment had hit a 45-year high. 
• Academics found that between 2012 and 2018, the total employment fell for the first time in India’s history — by as much as 9 million (or 90 lakhs) in 6 years. 
• In early 2020, Covid pandemic worsened unemployment in India.
• It was also shown that India is not a country for working women and its workforce is becoming increasingly male dominated.
• By August 2022, unemployment had hit a 12 month high. 
• An alarming trend of India is becoming a young country but with an aging workforce.

Rozgar Mela: Why not a Solution to the Unemployment Crisis?

• No Adequate Jobs: India needs to create anywhere between 20 million to 200 million new jobs but in comparison these Melas are providing negligible jobs.
• No Job Creation: These are only pre-existing vacancies, not new job creation.
• Low Public Employment: The size of public employment in India was already quite low. 

Problems of Employment in India: Complex both in form and content

• Partial Unemployment: A large part of the available working population for some part of the year, month, or day; this is best described as open underemployment.
• Very Low Productivity: Productivity being so low when peoples nominally engaged in work; this is often referred to as the disguised unemployment in the economy.
• Full, Continuous and Open Unemployment: It bears much the same characteristics as unemployment in developed, industrial economies.

Challenges:

• The recent rise in self-employment, worsening youth unemployment and rising unemployment with education levels. All of these also have a worsening gender aspect.
• India has a high youth population that faces the highest unemployment levels and also accounts for almost 80% of all unemployment in India. 
• India’s manufacturing has struggled and the less-educated workers are engaged in low-paying, precarious and unstable work arrangements.

Strategy to move towards Labor-Intensive Industrialisation:

• Change in India’s industrial policy framework
• A radical rethink of India’s labor regulatory regime by considering labor as human capital (which need to be invested)
• A comprehensive cluster development policy which allows small and medium sized firms to enjoy collective efficiency

Solution to India’s Unemployment:

• Enabling Environment: It is not the job of the government to give jobs; its job is to create the enabling environment so that the economy itself creates more jobs.
• Boost Manufacturing: Need to focus on the sectoral composition of GDP growth and India needs to boost its manufacturing.
• Need to Change Perception: While, the government is focussing on Make in India and the PLI (Production-linked Incentive) scheme but the government needs to focus on labor-intensive manufacturing as well as small and medium enterprises. 
  • PLI often has focussed more on capital-intensive manufacturing.

News Source: The Indian Express

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