NEW DELHI, Mar 28: The government on Thursday disputed the data put out by the International Labour Organisation which said employment scenario in India, especially among youth, was “grim.”
ILO, the labour organisation of the United Nations, in its report, stated that youth form nearly 83% of the unemployed workforce in India. The study also showed that the number of educated youth among all jobless people has gone up from 54.2% to 65.7% in 2022.
“This indicates that the problem of unemployment in India has become increasingly concentrated among the youth, especially the educated ones in urban areas,” the report said. But Youth Affairs Minister Anurag Thakur said that the data by Indian agencies painted a different picture.
“64 million people have registered on Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). It is a bigger number than the population of Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries,” Mr Thakur said at a media Conclave. “The 34 crore mudra loans that were given out, these are also creating job opportunities. Now they are job givers from being job seekers,” he said.
Elaborating on the ILO report, he said India had been relying on international rating agencies for years, but it should now go by the data from domestic ones which are now equally equipped. “We still have a slave mentality because we always depended on foreign ratings. We need to come out of it and trust organisations in our country,” Mr Thakur said.
The minister for youth affairs said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, since taking office in 2014, has also made policies to aid entrepreneurs, which was another way the government was generating employment. “Now people do not hesitate while launching a start-up. I have met so many people who studied at prestigious universities and took up jobs outside India, have now come back and are now running a start-up in India,” he said.
The ILO report claimed that India would add 70-80 lakh youths to the labour workforce in the next decade if it worked on 5 policy areas: job creation; quality of employment; inequalities in the labour market; strengthening both skills and policies of the active labour market; and bridging the knowledge deficits on labour market patterns and youth employment.
(Manas Dasgupta)