The jobs crisis worsens

India’s large and growing working age population, currently numbering close to a billion, is her greatest potential resource for rapid and sustained economic development. Sixteen years ago, I had warned that this demographic dividend could be squandered in the absence of the right policies (Business Standard , November 25, 2003, “Can India grow without Bharat?”, republished in 2007 by Academic Foundation in a book with the same title). Since then, successive governments have persisted with wrong or weak policies and programmes, including a poor public education and skilling system; an extremely complex and anti-job-creation maze of labour laws; trade and exchange rate policies that discourage labour-using exports and import-competing domestic production; poor infrastructure that undermines productivity and connectivity; a chronically