APN News, March 18, 2023
‘Central government alone cannot address the issue of unemployment. The entire ecosystem including central government, state government, and private enterprises are equally responsible to create an ecosystem to provide quality employment’ discussed by experts at a webinar on ‘Towards Good and Better Jobs: Budget 2023’ organised by CUTS International on March 17, 2023.
“Job creation and the need to skill, up skill, and reskill the workforce require attention by all the stakeholders particularly the government and industry experts”, said Pradeep Mehta, Secretary General, CUTS International said in his opening remarks.
Radhicka Kapoor, Senior Visiting Fellow, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), said “India faces a dual challenge of unemployment and under-employment in the labour market. Thereby the policy focus should move towards demand side measures and look beyond the supply side issues for employment generation”.
“It should be noted that Indian union Budget 2023 has given a positive signal to job creation by increasing capex infrastructure. Thus, it is high time that the whole development strategy be shifted to job creation rather than pursuing GDP growth in numbers”, said Ajay Shankar, Chairman, TEMA Council on Industrial Policy.
The panellists further discussed that the issue of job creation should be understood on the parameters of employment and employability. They also highlighted the need to re-think about Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI) schemes by making them applicable for labour-intensive sectors instead of capital-intensive ones.
Virjesh Upadhyay, Director General, Dattopant Thengadi Foundation, highlights the potential and emergence of care sector. He said, “there is a need for the government to design or enhance budgetary allocations and pay huge attention to develop the care sector”.
Janaki Srinivasan, Associate Professor, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) said, “It is crucial to regulate gig work especially in terms of transparency in reporting workforce numbers, reasonable data protection practices but provide data access to worker groups and governments, apart from algorithmic transparency and audits”.
Further, “India needs to focus on what kinds of employment are available for what cohorts of the wage group and for each cohort different strategies are required”, said Gayathri Vasudevan, Co-Founder and CEO, LabourNet.
Rituparna Chakraborty, Executive Director, Team Lease also said, “the future of work will require advanced technical skills and soft transferable skills to take advantage of the demographic dividend”.
This webinar was organised by CUTS under the project ‘Good and Better Jobs – II’ supported by Ford Foundation.
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