When 'left' means left out

ECONOMIC SURVEY 2003-04/ POVERTY AND PUBLIC POLICY

While states like Bihar and Orissa continue to have the highest poverty rates in the country, one of the less-advertised facts is that communist-run states like Kerala and West Bengal have the country's highest unemployment rates, and they're getting worse with each passing year, possibly due to the poor levels of industrial growth in these states.

While Kerala topped the unemployment charts with a 15.5 per cent unemployment even in 1993-94, this rose to just under 21 per cent in 1999-00. For West Bengal, number three in the list in 1993-94, the unemployment rate was a tad over 10 per cent.

In 1999-00, this rose by around half, to touch 15 per cent. At 11.4 per cent in 1993-94, Tamil Nadu had the second-highest unemployment rate, but managed to contain this to around 11.8 in 1999-00.

Indeed, while employment in Kerala grew just 0.1 per cent in the post-reforms 1994-2000 period, that for West Bengal was 0.4 per cent.

Both states, in fact, have a very low employment elasticity (0.01 for Kerala and 0.06 for West Bengal), a figure which does seem contradictory given the emphasis on rural reforms in the case of West Bengal "" conventional logic has it that once rural land reforms take place, there is increased investment, and that leads to increased job growth.

In Assam, for instance, the very successful shallow tubewell scheme of the mid-'90s resulted in an employment growth of 2 per cent annually in the post-reforms period of 1994-2000 and an employment elasticity of 0.7, the highest in the country.

States like Gujarat which have witnessed high industrial growth, by contrast, have had amongst the highest employment growth as well. While Haryana had a 2.4 per cent annual employment growth in the post-reforms 1994-2000 period, Gujarat saw a 2.3 per cent annual growth.