Unemployment rate keeps climbing — in Oct by 42% w.r.t. Sep, y-o-y by 29%
With respect to October 2023, there has been an approximately 29 per cent year-on-year rise in the unemployment rate in India. The unemployment rate in October was 10.05 per cent, up from 7.8 per cent during the same period last year.
This is according to survey data released by the highly-respected private survey and research group Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
With respect to September 2023, there has been a much steeper rise—by about as much as 42 per cent (it was 7.09 per cent in September).
In the first six months of FY 2023-24, that is, from April to September, the unemployment rate was around 7-8 per cent.
As for youth unemployment (15 to 24 years), data released by the World Bank (sourced from the International Labour Organisation) shows that in 2022, the rate in India stood at 23.22 per cent, much higher than its neighbours Pakistan (11.3%), Bangladesh (12.9%), China (13.2%) and Bhutan (14.4%). This is according to a report by The Wire.
Labour economist Santosh Mehrotra, a visiting professor at the University of Bath in the UK, told the Kolkata-based The Telegraph newspaper that the grim employment situation is due to a slow post-Covid recovery. He said while the organised sector had shaken off the effects of Covid, the unorganised sector, which provides livelihood to nearly 90 per cent of the country’s workforce, had not.
Mehrotra said that though the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), that is, the proportion of individuals employed or in search of jobs, increased from 49.8 per cent in 2017-18 to 57.9 per cent in 2022-23 (as per the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey), “(even) the unorganised sector is unable to absorb them” and therefore, “the youth unemployment situation is still very grim”.
NREGA Sangharsh Morcha Tapojay Mukherjee was quoted in the same article as saying that “in Bengal, the situation is worse because the MGNREGA is not being implemented (as a result of the Centre freezing funds alleging irregularities)”.
As reported by LiveMint, in October, the country’s manufacturing sector showed the slowest growth in eight months, primarily due to reduced demand for consumer goods.
The purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 55.5 in October from 57.5 in September, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which was the slowest rate of expansion recorded since February, said the report.
