A push for labour-intensive manufacturing

The outbreak of Covid-19 and the containment policies adopted to address it have presented an unparalleled shock to labour markets, and levels of unemployment have surged in India as a result. Estimates from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) suggest that 122 million jobs were lost in April 2020. The large scale loss of jobs is unsurprising given that much of India’s workforce is engaged in work arrangements that do not offer security of tenure and continuity of income. Also, many of them are in jobs that do not give them the luxury of working from home. Even amongst regular wage salaried workers, who account for 24 per cent of total employment, 69.5 per cent had no written job