Sir,
Unemployment or underemployment makes hungry (194.6) millions too poor to buy even minimum food. Indeed, employment is the panacea for hunger, malnutrition, food wastage, farmers agony and market stagnation. But India is fighting shy of job creation. According to recent Labour Bureau data, India created only 1.35 lakh jobs in 2015 in comparison to 4.19 lakh in 2013 and 9 lakh in 2011. It shows that instead of growing, livelihoods are being lost in India on a daily basis. India has been losing 550 jobs per day in the last 4 years. On the basis of this report, a Delhi based civil society group, Prahar predicted that employment would have got shrunk by 7 million in India by 2050, while population would have grown by 600 million.
Instead of protecting labour intensive sectors like farming, unorganised retail, micro and small enterprises that mainly contribute to current livelihoods in our country, we are going gaga over capital intensive technology. This has lowered the percentage of employment in agriculture out of total employment from 60 per cent in 1994 to 50 per cent in 2013 (World Bank report).
Unemployed receive a handsome allowance from the state in the countries like the United States of America but there is no such security in India. The need of the hour is to make a paradigm shift from city centric, capital intensive “Make in India” to village centric, labour intensive “Make in Bharat” to rescue our country from her abysmal Global Hunger Index and Human Development Index rank.
Yours etc…..
Sujit De, Kolkata
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