‘Fifty lakh men lost their jobs between 2016 and 2018’: Report

The State of Working India 2019 report published by Azim Premji University’s Centre for Sustainable Employment states that nearly 50 lakh men lost their jobs between November 2016 and 2018. The report states that the beginning of the decline in jobs coincided with demonetisation, although “no direct causal relationship can be established based only on these trends”.

The report states that unemployment in India has been on the rise since 2011. It says that the overall unemployment rate in 2018 was 6 per cent. This is in line with a recently-leaked report of the National Sample Survey Organisation which had shown that unemployment had touched a 45-year high at 6.1 per cent in 2017-2018.

The report used data from the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy or CMIE-CPDX, which is a nationally representative survey that covers about 160,000 households and 522,000 individuals. It is conducted in three ‘waves’, each spanning four months, beginning from January of every year. An employment-unemployment module was added to this survey in 2016.

According to the report, India’s unemployed are mostly higher educated and young. It states: “Among urban women, graduates are 10 per cent of the working age population but 34 per cent of the unemployed. The age group 20-24 years is hugely over-represented among the unemployed. Among urban men, for example, this age group accounts for 13.5 per cent of the working age population but 60 per cent of the unemployed.”

In addition to rising open unemployment among the higher educated, the report states, the less educated (and likely, informal) workers have also seen job losses and reduced work opportunities since 2016.

In general, women are much worse affected than men, the report adds.

Note: The headline of this short has been updated.