Unemployment in India
Unemployment is caused by a variety of factors:
A sizable population:
- Working population with little or no educational levels and vocational skills.
- Inadequate state backing, regulatory difficulties, and a lack of infrastructural, financial, and market linkages to small/ cottage industries or small firms make them unviable due to the cost and compliance overruns.
- Due to a lack of requisite education/skills, a large workforce is linked with the informal sector, which is not included in any employment data. Domestic assistants, construction laborers, and so forth.
- The curriculum taught in schools and universities is out of date and does not meet the current needs of the industry. The main source of structural unemployment is this.
- Inadequate infrastructure growth and poor manufacturing sector investments limit the secondary sector’s employment potential.
- Low agricultural output, along with a dearth of alternative employment alternatives, makes the transition from basic to secondary and postsecondary education challenging.
- Regressive social norms discourage women from seeking/maintaining work.
Impact:
- The issue of unemployment leads to the issue of poverty.
- Young people who have been unemployed for a long period engage in unlawful and unethical acts in order to make money. As a result, there is a rise in crime throughout the country.
- Antisocial elements can easily recruit unemployed people. This causes people to lose faith in the country’s democratic values.
- Unemployed persons frequently become hooked on drugs and alcohol or attempt suicide, resulting in losses to the country’s human resources.
- It also has an impact on the country’s economy, as the workforce that could have been productively engaged to generate resources instead becomes reliant on the remaining working population, resulting in rising socioeconomic costs for the government. For example, a 1% rise in unemployment causes a 2% drop in GDP.
Steps taken by the government include:
- The Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP) was established in 1980 with the goal of creating full-time jobs in rural areas.
- TRYSEM (Training of Rural Adolescents for Self-Employment): This program began in 1979 with the goal of assisting unemployed rural youth between the ages of 18 and 35 in acquiring self-employment skills. Youth and women from the SC/ST communities were given priority.
- RSETI/RUDSETI: In 1982, Sri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Educational Trust, Syndicate Bank, and Canara Bank collaborated to establish the “RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND SELF EMPLOYMENT TRAINING INSTITUTE” with the acronym RUDSETI near Dharmasthala in Karnataka, with the goal of addressing the youth unemployment problem. RSETIs (Rural Self-Employment Training Institutes) are now run by banks with active government and state government support.
- The Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) was launched on April 1, 1989, by merging the two previous wage employment programmes, the National Rural Employment Program (NREP) and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Program (RLEGP), on an 80:20 cost-sharing basis between the centre and the states.
- Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA): It is a social security programme that was established in 2005 to provide a minimum of 100 days of paid work per year to all families whose adult members choose unskilled labor-intensive work. People have the right to work under this act.
- The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), which was started in 2015, aims to help a significant number of Indian youngsters have access to industry-relevant skill training that will help them secure a better living.
- The Start Up India Scheme, which was introduced in 2016, intends to create an environment that encourages and supports entrepreneurship throughout the country.
- The Stand Up India Scheme, which was established in 2016, intends to make bank loans between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 1 crore available to at least one SC or ST borrower and at least one woman borrower each bank branch for the purpose of establishing a greenfield business.
