DEFICITS IN PRODUCTIVE EMPLOYMENT IN INDIA

The process of economic globalisation and liberalisation during the last two decades has reshaped the labour norms in India. As a result, the share of the informal workers in total employment has increased tremendously. During this period, a significant part of the incremental employment is being generated in the unorganised sector, where working conditions are far away from being satisfactory. Most of these workers are poor and vulnerable. Even after two decades of growth in the country, the quality of employment has been deteriorating which has led to a huge gap in productive employment. In this perspective, in this paper, an attempt has been made to explore such deficits among different types of workers as well as various sectors and regions of the economy. It has been observed that this gap is wider in the sectors/states where the informality quotient is higher. The workers in these sectors/states are largely poor and vulnerable and have no access to social security benefits while they are the neediest one. We can observe a strong positive association between the poverty of the workers (deficit in productive employment) and lack of social security. Therefore, it is suggested that on the one hand, there should be strong steps to remove (or reduce) the deficit in productive employment in every sector and region of the economy and on the other hand, the poor workers should be adequately covered with some social security benefits and for any poverty removal strategy, there should be due emphasis on provision of certain social protection to these workers.