The Great Disconnect: India’s Story of Growth without Decent Employment

K. P. Kannan ()
Additional contact information
K. P. Kannan: Centre for Development Studies

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2024, vol. 67, issue 2, No 4, 347-371

Abstract: Abstract There seems to be a ‘great disconnect’ between India’s remarkable growth and decent employment. In this keynote address I summarise the main features of this great disconnect that have several manifestations. These are (i) persistence of informal employment covering close to 90 percent of the workforce, (ii) low employment content of growth especially for the less educated, (iii) a slow but steady exclusion of women from the labour market, (iv) below subsistence wages for a majority of wage workers, (v) persistence of a high share of self-employment, and (vi) absence of either employment or social security for an overwhelming share of working people. The larger global context is one of an unrelenting process of ‘creative destruction’ a la Schumpeter in the advanced economies including China. Such a process in India has largely bypassed the less educated in accessing new employment. Further technological changes that are now knocking at the door in the form of frontier technologies are certain to bypass the less educated more aggressively than in the past. Will this great disconnect then become a perpetual trap in the Indian economy? Are there policy options for a more inclusive process of employment generation especially to the less educated in rural and urban areas who could also benefit by the advances in technological progress sweeping across the country. I argue for a policy shift to focus on addressing the developmental deficits mainly in rural areas while making a conscious policy choice to apply the technological advancements to benefit the hitherto neglected sectors as well as people.

Keywords: Employment elasticity; Creative destruction; Women’s participation rate; Frontier technologies; Employment policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J23 J30 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41027-024-00498-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ijlaec:v:67:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s41027-024-00498-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41027

DOI: 10.1007/s41027-024-00498-1

Access Statistics for this article

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics is currently edited by Alakh Sharma

More articles in The Indian Journal of Labour Economics from Springer, The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().