India’s leap into the services and IT sector without first going through the appropriate growth models and methods of educating and skilling its entire population holistically, has meant a massive disparity in income levels and widespread inequality.
This article is part of the series — Colaba Edit.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread socioeconomic upheaval — the International Labour Organisation predicts 1.6 billion informal economy workers could suffer “massive damage” to their livelihoods, and 81 million jobs have been lost in the Asia Pacific alone. This turmoil has been a consequence of a myriad of factors — lack of social protection, the inability of stranded workforces to return to their countries and cities of employment, and disparity in access to the new opportunities that the sudden growth in digital technology has offered. The situation is relatively acute in India, “the second-fastest digitising economy after Indonesia.” While the net of digitisation has been spread wide, it has only caught the surface of users — the number of users may be increasing, but this increase has not been equitable. Integrating informal workers into a formal social protection setup with targeted and equal job creation in the growing digital sector, by investing in education, reskilling and retraining, is the need of the hour.
The COVID-19 crisis offers an uncomfortable yet accurate preview of the social disruption that a sudden leap into digital futures may cause. India’s unemployment rate is already at an eight-year high — the 2018 labour force survey pegged the unemployment rate at 7.1 percent for urban men and 10.8 percent for urban women, increasing from 3 percent for urban men and 5.3 percent for urban women in 2012. These statistics suggest that current employment generation mechanisms are not in tune with the changing job market. Data on already over-saturated skilling courses that do not feed into the employment market must be collated to prevent the useless pumping of resources into such dead ends. Instead, attention and resources must be redirected to creating gender-agnostic courses to achieve balance in labour force participation, together with a new generation of skilled professionals that meets the requirements of the fourth industrial revolution.
Creating a ‘new generation’ of workers is always a daunting task. India’s leap into the services and IT sector without first going through the appropriate growth models and methods of educating and skilling its entire population holistically, has meant a massive disparity in income levels and widespread inequality. For example, while the IT and services sector contributes over 60 percent to India’s GDP, workforce participation in the industry is a mere 25 percent. It is predicted that India will have 800 million internet users by 2023. However, only 29 percent of women have access to the internet. It is also estimated that up to 12 million women in India could lose their jobs to automation by 2030. In a survey conducted by the Global Systems for Mobile Communications Association, 35 percent of women and 26 percent of men said they lack internet knowledge, regarding this as a barrier. The digital sector will certainly pay rich dividends and change the nature of the job economy, but the benefits must reach the nation’s entire fabric and every person. Therefore, overall development and GDP figures should not be taken at face value. Instead, countries must take a bottom-up approach and integrate the education and skilling systems to create equal opportunities and smooth transitions and prevent job losses from disruptions like pandemics.
Countries that released recovery packages in the pandemic’s initial states concurred that economic recovery, safety nets for the unemployed and migrant workers, and rehabilitation for vulnerable populations was of immediate concern. It is important for adequate gender-responsive decision-making be part of these processes as this will guarantee that the delivery of services reaches men and women equally. Task forces to manage the fallout of the pandemic must have a balanced representation of men and women. A gender-audit of institutions must also be the norm in government departments to gauge differences in gender and level of decision-makers to see if dissemination of amenities is affected once it is balanced.
India ranks fourth in South Asia in the global gender gap rankings that show which countries have closed several gender gaps, from education and employment to women in leadership. It ranks behind Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, as well as 20 Sub-Saharan countries. These rankings were pre-COVID-19; while most countries will have had to deal with similar pandemic impacts, all must make a concerted effort to make up for the added and unequal stress on employment and labour force participation.
The real estate sector, and consequently construction jobs, were in turmoil even before the pandemic hit. Property developers have a mountain of debt and so cannot get funding for new projects. Most migrant labour workers in cities like Mumbai are in the construction sector, meaning not only have they steadily lost jobs but with the exacerbated economic stress of the pandemic, they must be rehabilitated into new avenues, quickly. Repatriation is likely to take up a large chunk of the next few years, at least. A more resilient approach for future pandemic management and the subsequent shake-up in jobs is establishing and providing transition skills sets to low-skilled workers. Identifying a fixed number and type of low-skilled jobs and ensuring a contingency plan to provide transitional skills amid upheaval is required. Existing centres can be utilised for such transition courses, which can be fast-tracked in times of emergency.
Tapping into the digital economy’s potential of mass employment can be a significant measure that provides structure in formal employment opportunities and social protection policies. However, countries like India must take care to ensure that growth in these sectors also absorbs the unemployment caused by waning opportunities in other sectors, or risk exacerbating the already bleak post-pandemic employment figures and magnifying inequality.
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Aditi Ratho was an Associate Fellow at ORFs Mumbai centre. She worked on the broad themes like inclusive development gender issues and urbanisation.
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