Unemployment

The Indian Economy is Doing Well, But Not Many Indians Are

The economy is growing rapidly and many economic indicators are flashing green. But the path that India has chosen, of promoting national business champions, has its limits. Economic distress is…
▶02-May-2024
T.N. Ninan

Rethinking Employment and Industrialisation in India

Corporate-driven industrialisation has failed to create the jobs that India's youth need. We need a different kind of growth, one based on reducing the productivity gap between rural and urban…
▶09-Jan-2024
Amit Bhaduri

How Dynamic are India’s Labour Markets?

While policy works to provide more jobs to the unemployed, it must also tackle the deep-seated structural issues in India's urban labour market: long-term unemployment; women exiting the labour…
▶07-Jun-2022
Rahul Menon, Paaritosh Nath

Growing Distress and a Falling Unemployment Rate

The Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2019-20 has thrown up some unusual and contradictory patterns in employment and unemployment. However, the trends in the labour market over three years of the…
▶13-Sep-2021
Ishan Anand, Anjana Thampi

Making Sense of India’s Measures of Unemployment

The co-existence of seasonal and regular employment has posed a challenge over the decades for accurately measuring unemployment in India. An explainer and a discussion in the light of the puzzling…
▶09-Sep-2021
Rahul Menon

The Time Is Right for an Urban Employment Guarantee Programme

Urban workers have been the most badly hit by Covid-19. An employment guarantee would provide income support & also improve urban public services. Criticisms that it is unaffordable & that it…
▶24-Nov-2020
Amit Basole, Rajendran Narayanan, Anand Shrivastava, Rakshita Swamy

A Moment for Civilizational Introspection

The devastating effects of the pandemic upon the working poor should be a recognition of the collapse of our moral centre as a nation and as a people. The elite have exiled the poor from their…
▶30-Sep-2020
Harsh Mander

The Unequal Effects of the Covid-19 Crisis on the Labour Market

The unequal labour market in India would have seen a widening of disparities after Covid-19 struck. Those at the bottom, with few skills, limited education & without security, would have been…
▶15-Jul-2020
Radhicka Kapoor
Covid-19

India's Lockdown

If the first option of dealing with Covid-19 by imposing a complete lockdown but accompanied by comprehensive State support is not possible, then we must think of alternatives. Here is an…
▶09-Apr-2020
Debraj Ray, S Subramanian, Lore Vandewalle
Explainer

Understanding India's Jobs Challenge

Unemployment today is at an all-time high but that is not the only challenge in jobs: more and more workers are withdrawing from the labour force, the wages of casual workers are below a reasonable…
▶26-Aug-2019
Radhicka Kapoor