India's booming IT and software sector employs about 2 million.
people. But R. Nagaraj, an economist at Bombay's Indira Gandhi
Institute for Development Research, notes that is a fraction of the
country's work force of 400 million."These jobs are concentrated in few
pockets like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurgaon where they are very visible and
these young boys and girls get fairly high paying jobs, but these are only small
specks in the ocean of unemployed people in towns and villages," he said. "If
you go to smaller towns, you find that educated young people do not find
adequate jobs."With one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, it may
seem odd that India is struggling with high unemployment. That is India's
paradox, say economists. Its economy is growing fast, but not fast
enough to hand out jobs to 10 million people who enter the work force each year. And there is a huge backlog of people who lost jobs in recent
years and have yet to find new ones.The official unemployment rate is
about 8 percent of the working population. Economists, however,
say the real rate is much higher, because millions of people
have given up looking for jobs or have never registered as unemployed.
Dec 3, 2004
Paradox of India's growth - Not enough jobs!
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Hi Gautam,
ReplyDeleteFeels great that you have visited Fire@x blog. I am a part of the web team of the blog.
I agree with you when you say India is not churning out as many jobs as people...but look at the "QUALITY" of people passing out of examinations every year..
ReplyDeleteWould you risk giving jobs away to such *promising-young-candidates* only to accommodate a greater fraction of the country's work force of 400 million?
Hi Anonymous
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe for some jobs people might be "overqualified". There are cases of urban school going kids now landing jobs...maybe, the very low end version of the jobs can be done by people who are not really "high" quality...
If the gap is not addressed, we could be sitting on a potential time bomb!
Well, jobless growth is one small corner of the problem. Sadly, market bulls, investors and a lot of people are seeing only half of the picture -- the monetary side.
ReplyDeleteWhile one feels great about the India Growth Story, there is a hidden tragedy -- a sort of India Death Story, unreported by the media. It is a story of social and environmental costs being quietly passed on by manufacturers, and frankly, society and environment are getting saturated.
An important social principle is violated by many manufacturing activities: While engaged in a profit-making activity, one must not leave a mess behind for the rest of society to clean up.
This principle can easily be understood as common decency. If I come to your house as a salesman in order to market something, I must clean up any mess that I make while selling my product.
But this principle is continually breached by manufacturers and marketers on a large scale in our country, and nobody even thinks of objecting!
Have you ever pondered how mineral water and soft-drink manufacturers who sell their product to you in a PET bottle take no further responsibility what happens to their non-biodegradable bottle? Most often, it ends up as litter in the environment, because the consumer simply does not know what to do with the bottle, other than tossing it away.
This is not how it should be. At the time of conceptualizing and designing the product, the manufacturer has the responsibility of thinking what will happen to the discarded packaging, or, in the case of non-consumables, to the product itself after its use. He must take the responsibility to create a safe avenue for its disposal or recycling.
This requires a mechanism to collect the empty container or used product. So he must set up that mechanism. For instance, the grocery shopkeeper may incentivate the consumer to return PET bopttles to him by initially charging a coupl;e of rupees as deposit for the bottle, which he returns when the consumer returns the bottle to him. These bottles can then be sent back to the company’s recycling facility. (This is how soft-drink bottles made of glass were returned to manufacturers until very recently, remember? We, the consumers, were OK with this system. So why the sudden urge to package everything in discardable materials?)
We should mobilize citizens to demand legislation that every manufacturer must repurchase/collect and recycle as many tonnes of raw material as he uses on a week-by-week basis. For example, if a mineral-water manufacturer uses ten tonnes of plastics per week to manufacture bottles, he MUST buy back ten tonnes of plastic scrap and safely recycle it.
Now think for a moment about used automobiles. Used cars and scooters in India are sold as second-hand vehicles, and then third-hand, fourth-hand. A second-hand vehicle may go from a metropolis to a small town or village. It keeps going further and further into the interiors as it ages, as its condition deteriorates and its market price dwindles. And then?
And then it is sometimes sold to a garage at a throwaway price, and this garage may salvage spare parts from it. ut what remains of this vehicle, including worn-out tyres, may lie around rusting and gathering dust for years and years on some deserted road. The tyres, when they are often burnt in winter for warmth, releasing black, acrid smoke and carcinogenic chemicals into the atmosphere.
Or it lies as a rusting eyesore in some building compound for many years as the last owner loses all motivation to either repair it or sell it.
Thus, every automobile manufacturer sells a product that turns into many hundred tonnes of junk — assorted metal, plastic, glass and rubber junk — after 6-8 years. They end up littering the beautiful countryside with this junk. Is this socially acceptable behaviour?
If one looks for solutions, they are not difficult to find. Legislation and regulations are the answer.
Automobile manufacturers must be required by law to buy back that many tonnes of metals, plastics, glass etc every week, and find ways to recycle them. The cost may be met by raising the market price of their product… but the responsibility to make the recycling activity happen MUST be fixed on the manufacturer of every product.
The same applies to tyres, batteries, plastic goods, newspapers, textiles, chemicals, auto-lubricant oils, etc. The list is long.
It is possible that this will make some manufacturing and marketing processes unviable. If so, this would mean that these economic activities were unviable in the first place, and were sustainable only by passing on hidden costs to the environment, to society and to consumers! Such activities must necessarily come to an end.
Many industrial activities are environmentally and socially subsidized to keep them economically profitable. Let us lobby governments to knock off that subsidy and see how many activities remain sustainable!
I propose peaceful demonstrations to compel industries to self-regulate, and legislators to pass laws:
Small groups of citizens shall collect the branded packaging material of various manufacturers from the environment, and delivering them in large bundles every week to their corporate offices. It belongs to them, right? So let them have it back!
A peaceful demonstration like this, sustained over some weeks, would make a powerful statement. I think this will make a powerful media impact as well… and thereby, an impact on the consciousness of people.
This would be the first step to making changes happen. Citizens, industry and government must first be made to acknowledge that there is a problem; then viable solutions will begin to emerge.
What say, fellow-citizens? I would appreciate your detailed responses to this idea.
Those who wish to join me in peaceful social action (as described) are urged to email me at friendlyghost.kk@gmail.com
Warmly,
Krish
http://friendlyghost.rediffiland.com
http://globalwarming.rediffiland.com