The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: A Union government paper has noted that there is low to moderate underemployment in the country, in what the Financial Express calls “official acknowledgement of the dismal jobs scenario in the country.”
The Union government and leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been notably reticent about addressing the issue of jobs which is one of the chief issues this election.
The paper, by Sonakhya Samaddar, released by the Union statistics ministry and reported on by Express, notes that prevalent labour dynamics dictate that deficiencies in working conditions – which affect those who are employed – are ignored. Usually underemployment is measured with low working hours, adopting an International Labour Organisation-reported standard of 40 hours a week. The paper notes that longer working hours do not indicate adequate employment or that the worker is pleased to work for those hours.
The paper thus measures underemployment not just based on hours worked by a person and ties it to policy decisions.
It says that despite India’s unemployment rate standing at a mere 6.8% according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey data of the first quarter of 2023, the underemployment metric was “surprisingly high”.
The report said that the overall underemployment score for India was observed to be 62.28 suggesting the presence of low to moderate underemployment in the economy. The urban underemployment score is 63.95 and rural one is 61.73. Also, the female underemployment score is 59.81 and for males, it is 62.50, the report said.
The paper stresses that this score can be used by policymakers who can set a target of 70 or higher – “conceived as the adequate state of employment without any underutilization.”
A report by the ILO had recently found that unemployment in India is predominantly a problem among youths, especially young people with a secondary or higher level of education, and it has intensified over time. In 2022, the share of unemployed youths in the total unemployed population was 82.9%.
Meanwhile, Business Standard has reported that early every one in five workers employed in the organised non-farm establishments in the first half of FY23 was a contractual hire, citing the latest Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) results released by the Labour Bureau.
The report has it that the share of contractual employees in the nine major non-farm sectors more than doubled to nearly 18% in the first half (April to September) of FY23 from nearly 8.5% in the second half of FY22.