Where Are The Jobs?

Why is an economy apparently on the upswing not being able to generate enough new jobs? Welcome to jobless growth

- Shweta Punj And M.G. Arun

At 8 pm every day, 200 young technicians at pathology giant Thyrocare Technologies begin work at its automated clinical chemistry laboratory at Turbhe in Navi Mumbai. For the next 12 hours, they operate a range of state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment, which can process upto 200,000 investigations a night for thyroid, kidney and liver diseases, testing nearly 45,000 samples flown in from 1,300 collection centres in India. What would have taken several days of investigation by at least 1,000 technicians a decade ago is now being done by a workforce a fifth the size in less than a day. “Many job-seekers are qualified for the job, but not skilled,” says A. Velumani, the company’s CEO, who ensures freshers are given specialised training. The new challenges are exciting and even lighten the manual load, but that’s for a lucky few. For the majority of jobseekers in the healthcare segment, the prospects are grim, with little job security and salaries roughly half what large diagnostic chains may offer.

Every month, a million Indians become age-eligible to join the workforce, but the growth in jobs has not kept pace with the rising number of aspirants. The result: unemployment has been on the rise, despite India supposedly being one of the brighter spots in a slowing global economy. Thirty-three-year-old Ratna Shankar Choubey, a father of two, in Bihar recently lost his job for resisting a change from being a permanent to temporary in the company. “Employment creation will be one of our greatest challenges for the next decade,” says Jayant Sinha, minister of state for finance. India’s unemployment rate grew from 6.8 per cent in 2001 to 9.6 per cent in 2011, according to Census 2011 data.

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