'Govt counted 40L jobs that weren't created'

It may not create a political storm similar to what the poverty-data have done, but the government may have erred in calculating the data on employment. A researcher has said that in 2011-12, only over 90 lakh jobs were created, against over 1.3 crore that the government has claimed.

A note published in the prestigious Economic and Political Weekly has pointed out an error in the methodology used in calculation, and said that the estimation of jobs created in 2010-11 and 2011-12 was flawed. It says that the error has crept in due to wrong use of census data.

“Correcting for an error in method, it can be shown that the National Sample Survey Organisation had underestimated employment in 2009-10, and therefore overestimated the number of jobs created between 2009-10 and 2011-12  by over 40 lakh, bringing the figure down from 1.39 crore to around 93.5 lakh,” said the research paper published this week.

The declining rate of employment, despite faster pace of industrialisation, has been worrying  planners and experts.

A report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for 2013 also noted that “robust economic growth in South Asia in the 2000s was largely associated with an improvement in labour productivity rather than job creation, which has been referred to as ‘jobless growth’, a phenomenon most notable in India.”

The report points out: “Even where jobs were created, a large share of workers remained in agriculture, in the urban informal sector or in unprotected jobs in the formal sector. Thus, like many regions, growth has failed to deliver a significant number of better jobs in the formal economy.” 

According to the ILO, the share of workers in informal employment in the non-agricultural sector is as high as 83.6 per cent in 2009-10. 

The ILO, in its report, also expresses doubt over whether the manufacturing sector would be able to provide employment in a significant way. “It remains unclear whether the manufacturing sector will be able to absorb large numbers of jobseekers in countries like India. In India, the share of workers in manufacturing was just 11 per cent in 2009-10, no higher than a decade earlier,” it pointed out. 

In another report presented in a convention concluded last month, the ILO had said, “Robotics and automation would most probably accelerate the ongoing decline of manufacturing employment worldwide, and seem likely to penetrate other sectors too, including transport, hospitals and the caring profession.”