Think employment: Centre's withdrawal of labour law reform is unfortunate

A first step should be to re-issue the industrial employment deregulation proposal, which has just been withdrawn

As the run-up to the 2019 general elections begins, the question of whether jobs are being created on a sufficiently large scale has begun to dominate conversations in both policy-making and political circles. Some recent attempts to quantify the growth of formal employment have suggested — by looking, for example, at the data from the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation — that there has been considerable growth of jobs in the formal sector. However, these figures have justly been questioned as not tallying with other estimates, particularly the large-scale National Sample Survey. In addition, it is unclear if they indicate job