one can take cue from the agriculture sector of india, where the demand for farm produce is not commensurate with supply, to understand the jobs generation issue. on the supply side, the number of growers is high and this has resulted in glut in the market for such crops as wheat and sugarcane. by contrast, farmers who have wisely shifted towards alternative options, for example floriculture, are prospering in an otherwise distressed sector.
this is enough to understand what needs to be done in manufacturing and services sectors to generate jobs for the large number of youths entering the labourforce.
be it the conventional textile industry or telecom, the demand for their products has hit the wall. thus, these industries cannot be expected to generate the jobs needed in the economy. the information technology sector is not in similar distress and new engineers (with updated skills) are being recruited. this is owing to demand for new tech, including cloud, artificial intelligence and robotics, for which the supply side needs to produce more and for which more and more workers are required.
the government’s skill india scheme failed to take note of the fact that by skilling young Indians in conventional industries where the supply is already more than demand, we are only creating unemployable skilled youths. another area of pain is that even the demand cannot be boosted since new buyers are either jobless or underpaid.
for india to create new jobs, we need to closely study the supply and demand sides of all sectors of the economy. this study would reveal that unless we create an altogether new supply side, the dream to create jobs will remain as such. the country needs to invest heavily in emerging industries, for example cannabis (coca-cola has recently announced its plans to infuse cannabis in its beverages) and lithium-ion battery powered electric vehicles.
the underlying problem is that we are wasting our time and money in skilling the workforce keeping in mind traditional jobs and industries. this is exactly the same as is with the farm sector- the supply side is already outperforming the demand side. the best way to create jobs is to identify promising new industries, encourage setting up of new enterprises in these and skill youths with respect to these findings.
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