Economic Survey’s 7.9 million non-farm jobs target is easily achievable: MC Analysis

Economic Survey target easily achiveable

The Economic Survey's target of creating 7.9 million non-farm jobs a year until 2030 may not be that audacious, as the country created nearly 10 million jobs in non-farm sector, excluding construction, in FY23, a Moneycontrol analysis shows.

Job creation in non-farm sector averaged 8.31 million over the last seven years, an analysis of data released by the Reserve Bank of India shows.

The country is expected to do even better in FY24, as an earlier analysis by Moneycontrol found that 47 million jobs were created in the previous fiscal. The rate of job creation was the highest in over four decades.

The concern may be a switch back to agriculture. While employment in agriculture sector declined to its lowest level of 200 million in FY17, it has since picked up.

In FY23, agriculture employed more people than it did at any point in the last 17 years.

The sector added 1.9 percent more jobs in FY23 compared with the previous year.

Another problem for the economy is creating high-paying jobs.

Construction, though a non-farm sector, for instance, created 4.4 million jobs in FY23, twice as many as manufacturing, but most of this would have been informal work and with lower remuneration.

The ratio of construction jobs has been rising. Of the 596.7 million people employed in FY23, 12.5 percent came from the construction sector, up from 10.8 percent a decade ago.

A fourth of new jobs created post-pandemic belonged to the construction sector.

An analysis of periodic labour force survey data shows that four in five people employed in construction were casual labourers in 2022-23. In contrast, nearly half of the workforce in manufacturing was regular wage or salaried workers.

Manufacturing seems to be an Achilles heel of job growth. Its contribution to job creation was muted at 10 percent or 2 million people in FY23.

The average earning of a person engaged in casual work was 40 percent lower than earnings of a salaried worker in 2022-23, assuming the casual labourer worked all 30 days in a month.