Jobs euphoria may be misplaced

Over half of the increase in employment in the organised sector has come through growth of contract workers, survey shows

The discourse on India’s inability to create productive formal jobs for its rapidly rising young workforce has been injected with positivity after a recent study Towards a Payroll Reporting in India (Pulak Ghosh, professor, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and Soumya Kanti Ghosh, group chief economic advisor, State Bank of India) suggested that 590,000 jobs are being created every month. Combining enrolment numbers from multiple administrative datasets — the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation and National Pension System — for the time period up to November 2017, the study extrapolates that seven million jobs will