India’s unemployment rate rises to 6.9%
November 16, 2018
The unemployment rate in India has risen to 6.9% in October, the highest in two years, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
What is worse is that the labour participation rate – a measure of the proportion of adults willing to work fell to 42.4%. This is the lowest since January 2016, according to CMIE. The estimated number of persons employed during October 2018 was 397 million. This was 2.4% lower than the 407 million persons employed in October 2017. “This sharp fall in the employment rate in October is perhaps the most worrisome measure of the labour markets.” CMIE said in its bulletin.
Only 39.5 per cent of the adult population was employed in October. This is the lowest
proportion of adult population that is employed, the report said. Labour participation rate was of the order of 47-48 per cent before demonetization. But it
fell sharply after demonetization and it has still not recovered. We did see this proportion rise in September but that increase was negated in October, the report said.
According to the report, the number of people unemployed who are actively looking for a job has been on the rise, too. As of October 2018, 29.5 million unemployed individuals were actively looking for jobs. This was more than the 21.6 million unemployed individuals looking for jobs in during the same period last year.
A lot of factors have led to this some of them being the lack of quality institutions, lack of market-ready courses and the inability of the government to create more jobs.