Labour Force and Employment Growth in India Evidence from the EUS (2011–12) and PLFS (I and II)

Abstract

Employment is one of the key building blocks of Indian development policy (Papola and Sahu 2012). Driving growth in the labour and workforce is a critical challenge for Indian policymakers and is a hotly contested issue in political and academic debates. Creating decent job opportunities outside of the agricultural sector has been one of the biggest challenges to confront policymakers in recent decades in their attempts to achieve faster and more inclusive growth. In this regard, India’s low employment growth, termed “jobless growth,” in a phase of high-income growth, has sparked intense debates in the Indian labour market since the turn of the 20th century (Mehrotra et al 2012; Kannan and Raveendran 2009; Srivastava 2016).