National employment policy on the cards in budget 2018

Prompted by the rising unemployment in the country, the government in the next budget might introduce a national employment policy outlining a comprehensive blueprint to generate quality jobs in every industry.

The policy blueprint will be shaped by economic, social and labour policy interventions, the Economic Times reported.

The policy is likely to be announced in the upcoming Budget, which will be the last one from the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government before general elections in 2019.

The employment policy will have many sides and applications. It will incentivize employers to create more jobs, introduce economic reforms appealing to companies along with supporting the medium and small scale industries which provide a huge chunk of jobs, a senior government official told ET.

Over 10 million youth join the workforce every year. But there are not enough jobs to engage them and thus, the unemployment issue has risen to the extent of electoral importance—used by opposition parties to attack the Modi-led government.

The job generation speed faced a six-year low in 2015 as only 135,000 new jobs were created compared to 421,000 jobs in 2014 and 419,000 in 2013, as per a quarterly industrial survey conducted by the Labour Bureau under the labour ministry.

Another significant aim of the policy would be to engage more workers in the country’s organised sector because that would get them minimum wages and social security, the government official told the newspaper.

The policy could actually be impactful in this regard as over 90 cercent of workers in India are engaged in the informal sector and hence, does not benefit from any social security law or minimum wage rule.

The government is closely assessing the labour conditions and employment trends in the country in order to lay out specific targets and set up a monitoring system. The things the government is looking at include demographic composition of workers, employment challenges in different sectors, and the overall macroeconomic condition.