India witnessed a decline in generating regular jobs in the last five years, according to the Economic Survey 2023-24.

In contrast, the engagement of the labour force in self-employment has increased from 2018-19 till 2022-23, said the survey tabled in Parliament on Monday. The survey quoted the data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) carried out by the statistics and programme implementation ministry.

The regular wage/salaried jobs are mainly formal sector jobs which have social securities like health insurance and pension for the workers. The self-employed workers are mostly engaged in the agriculture sector and other low-remunerative jobs, two labour economists said.

Nearly one-third of the self-employed persons are unpaid workers. They said denial of opportunities for regular employment forces the workers to take up self-employment, which is not a good sign for the job sector.

“In terms of the employment status of workers, 57.3 per cent of the total workforce is self-employed and 18.3 per cent is working as unpaid workers in household enterprises,” the survey said.

Labour economist Santosh Mehrotra, a visiting professor at the University of Bath, said agriculture added 60 million workers during this government's tenure. It means people are taking up farming because they have no better job.

The number of youths “Not in Education, Employment or Training” in India is among the highest in the world. Not finding jobs, young people slip into this category. This number is constantly rising and is over 100 million now, Mehrotra said.

“Are you creating enough jobs for all those who are joining the workforce? The failure of this government is much more than the previous governments'. The youth unemployment rate has doubled in the 10 years,” Mehrotra said.

Another economist, who did not wish to be named, said that about 80 per cent of the employment being generated is poor-quality jobs, which fail to provide a respectable living standard to the people.

He added that the present growth model is not focused on creating jobs. Employers prefer a contract mode of employment. As a result, employment creation is a residual effect of growth, he said.