People had high hopes from the Modi government that promised to create two crore Jobs. People thought that the Gujarat Model can be emulated all over the country and India will achieve double-digit growth. However, these aspirations and expectations have been met with huge disappointment and the demographic dividend which was being talked about is slowly turning out to be a demographic nightmare.
Imagine millions of youth taking up arms against the state. Youth are waiting for the Prime ministers reply on his failed promise to provide decent jobs. Now, the efforts are being made to shift the goalpost to 2022. Therefore, many schemes are being launched to divert people’s attention from the main issues. Issues such as the Ram Mandir and Hindu-Muslim topic are being floated to create communal tension, and the media is the biggest culprit here. It is no surprise that because of the rise in unemployment there has also been a rise in fringe groups and lynch mobs such as gaurakshaks and Karni Sena.
Let us understand the reason for this crisis. First of all, due to automation, there is a slow creation of jobs. In the manufacturing sector, where the machines do most of the work, there will be further losses of jobs in the future because machines are more productive than humans. Somewhere our educational institutions also do not teach us to deal with real-life challenges in the workplaces there is a huge skills gap.
Several studies have indicated the many companies do not find a large chunk of engineers employable. And, only 1% of the youth graduate from institutions like the IIT’s and IIM’s.
Students from government schools are the worst sufferers when it comes to unemployment in India as surveys have shown that children in government schools struggle in basic arithmetic calculations and are unable to read texts properly. Moreover, language is a significant barrier for students in such schools. Women are also the worst sufferers due to the job crisis. In 2017, 18.3 million were unemployed. The situation is grimmer for people who are looking for government jobs. According to a BBC news report, there were 20 million applicants, including PhD candidates, for 1,00,000 positions in the railway sector. Many faulty decisions and scams, which could have been avoided, have further aggravated the problem.
According to the Center for Monitoring of the Indian Economy (CMIE) data, 1.5 Million people lost their jobs due to demonetization. Adding to the problem many people are moving away from agriculture to non-agricultural jobs. According to the National Sample Survey, 22 crore Indians are employed in agriculture. People shifting to non-agricultural jobs is because they are underpaid and overstaffed.
So, what are the solutions to India’ s job crisis there are key sectors in the Indian economy which can bring our economy back on .
- Modernization of agriculture which is the backbone of the economy.
- Tourism which can contribute immensely to our GDP.
- Education
- Healthcare
- Small and Medium Enterprise(SMES)
These five sectors alone take India a long way and perhaps make India a superpower one day.