India generated 125 million jobs between FY14 & FY23, says SBI Report

Between FY14 and FY23, India generated 125 million jobs, which is 4.3 times more than the preceding decadal period of FY04-FY14, a State Bank of India (SBI) report released on Wednesday showed.

“If we look at the decadal employment numbers as per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), during FY14-23 India has created 125 million jobs, compared to only 29 million during FY04-14. Even if we exclude agriculture, the total number of jobs created in manufacturing and services is at 89 million during FY14-FY23 and 66 million during FY04-FY14,” the report said.

Besides, the report also noted that the total employment reported by micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) registered with the MSME Ministry has crossed 200 million.

“As of July 4, 46.8 million Udyam-registered MSMEs reported 202 million jobs, including 23.2 million jobs by GST-exempted informal micro enterprises, up by 66 per cent from (a total of) 121 million jobs in July last year,” the report noted.

The report also notes that better-paid jobs are becoming available in the economy as the comparison of Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) data with KLEMS data shows that in FY24, the share of EPFO jobs is 28 per cent, which is drastically lower than the average share of the 5-year period (FY19-FY23) at 51 per cent.

“As EPFO data primarily captures low-income jobs, the declining share is quite encouraging and indicates that possibly better-paid jobs are becoming available in the economy,” it notes.

Besides, the report also notes that the KLEMS data shows that the total labour force in India is at 597 million, which is nearly equivalent to 568 million as per the recently released ASUSE survey for 2022-23. This total number of labour force is significantly different from private employment surveys.

“The RBI KLEMS provisional data on employment thus seems to be in consonance with the ASUSE survey,” it said.

The report also criticised private employment surveys for showing a lower labour force and said that they possibly suffer from innate flaws in their sample selection technique, thereby under-representing women and young children as well as the poor while over-representing the other extreme, as the share of the labour force calculated by them is quite low compared to government surveys.

The report also calculated that there has been a significant increase in employment in construction activities, as the government's focus is on the infrastructure sector.