Abstract
Unlike other countries at similar levels of development, the transition of the workforce out of agriculture in India is incomplete. While we have a fair understanding of developments at the national and state levels, due to data limitations, very little is known about the processes at play and the consequent labour market outcomes across the size class of villages and towns of India. In this chapter, we outline the stages in the rural non-farm employment transition since this has implications for the rate of urbanisation and the changes in key workforce indicators at the national level in the inter-censal period 2001–11. We, then, provide estimates of a few key indicators of the labour market across size class of cities. Finally we expose the level of job concentration across 21 broad sections of industry at the sub-national level. From the analysis it emerges that initiatives aimed at the expansion of non-farm employment need to begin with an improved understanding of the conduciveness of the urban employment pattern in the nearby areas. However, given the dispersed nature of census towns, an alternative view would be that small towns and villages, irrespective of whether they are in the vicinity of an urban agglomeration or not, could be engines of growth.
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Notes
- 1.
Target 1B: Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people.
- 2.
- 3.
As per the official definition, the underemployment rate is the “proportion of usually employed who were found to be not employed (i.e. reporting either unemployed or not in labour force) during the week preceding the date of survey”.
- 4.
Over the period 1983–1984 to 2004–2005, the share of agriculture in value added as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) decreased from 39 to 20 % in 2004–2005 while the share of agriculture in total employment declined from 68 to 58 %.
- 5.
In a recent article, Rodrik (2015) has focused on the issue of premature deindustrialization. “What develo** countries are experiencing today is appropriately called “premature deindustrialization,” a term that seems to have been first used by Dasgupta and Singh (2006). In most of these countries, manufacturing began to shrink (or is on course for shrinking) at levels of income that are a fraction of those at which the advanced economies started to deindustrialize. These develo** countries are turning into service economies without having gone through a proper experience of industrialization” (p. 3).
- 6.
“Underpinning some of these developments is the decline in medium-skilled routine jobs in recent years. This has occurred in parallel to rising demand for jobs at both the lower and upper ends of the skills ladder. As a result, relatively educated workers that used to undertake these medium-skilled jobs are now increasingly forced to compete for lower-skilled occupations. These occupational changes have shaped employment patterns and have also contributed to the widening of income inequality recorded over the past two decades” (International Labour Office 2015: 12).
- 7.
In their review article, Beaudry and Schiffauerova (2009) examine the viewpoint of three protagonists in the debate on factors conducive for employment generation: A. Marshall (who stressed the importance of specialisation or clustering), J. Jacobs (who stressed the importance of diversity and competition) and M. Porter (who believes that specialisation and clustering was important).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ranjeeta Mishra for research assistance and to Eric Denis and Marie-Hélène Zérah for detailed comments on an earlier draft.
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Chandrasekhar, S. (2017). Urbanisation in a Decade of Near Jobless Growth. In: Denis, E., Zérah, MH. (eds) Subaltern Urbanisation in India. Exploring Urban Change in South Asia. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3616-0_5
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