New Delhi: Job cuts have been a tough nut to crack for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the past year and with General Elections due next year, its last complete Budget is likely to come up with a new 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 and is expected to incentivise 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.
Unemployment has been one of the opposition’s favourite tools to attack the Modi government with.
The pace of job generation faced a six-year low in 2015 as only 1,35,000 new jobs were created, compared to 4,21,000 jobs in 2014 and 4,19,000 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, Economic Times quoted a senior government official as saying.
The policy could help as over 90 percent of workers in India are engaged in the informal sector and hence, do not benefit from any social security law or minimum wage rule.
RSS-backed Swadeshi Jagran Manch has also pointed out that the government is stressing on rural employment as a compulsory consideration.
“Youth employment and promotion of jobs in general is likely to come up in the budget. Rural jobs are the main focus,” said Ashwini Mahajan, national co-convener of the Manch.
An indicator of this is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with the Niti Aayog, sector experts and representatives on January 10.
Talking about the meeting, Mahajan said, “Issues relating to employment generation were explained. Experts made presentations on it. The SP Gupta report was also referred to.”
SP Gupta, a former member of the then Planning Commission, had submitted a report in May 2015 regarding medium and small scale industries contributing to generation of employment and how the sector can be used in rural areas in promoting jobs.
“Small enterprises, i.e., small scale units, not only play a crucial role in providing large scale employment opportunities at lower capital cost than large scale industries, but also help in industrialisation of rural and backward areas, thereby reducing regional imbalance, assuring more equitable distribution of national income and wealth. Small scale industry units are also supplementing and complementing to large and medium scale units as ancillary units,” said the SP Gupta report.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has time and again talked of providing support to the medium and small scale Enterprises (MSME). However, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) has caused maximum damage to the small scale industries.
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