Business Desk, Etv Bharat: The job market in India is going through one of its worst patches as various data indicators show that unemployment remains high in the country, with quality of jobs on offer also taking a hit.
Official data from the government’s digital jobs portal-- Atamanirbhar Skilled Employee Employer Mapping (ASEEM) -- launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 11 July has seen registration of over 69 lakh job seekers in nearly 40 days. In comparison, only 2.93 lakh job openings by 514 employers are posted on the portal.
A recent Indian Express report further added that only a small fraction of these registered individuals on the portal actually managed to get hired by employers.
Between 14 August and 21 August, more than 7 lakh people registered, but the number of people who took up jobs during the week stood at mere 691, according to the report.
Independent think tank Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data last week also showed that salaried jobs in India have declined by 18.9 million, or a whopping 22%, during the lockdown imposed after the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Salaried jobs were estimated at 86.1 million in 2019-20. This fell to 68.4 million in April 2020 and further to 67.2 million by July 2020.
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Consequently, competition for new jobs has also increased manifold. According to LinkedIn’s latest ‘Labour Market Update’, a monthly update on hiring trends and insights, even as number of jobs posted on the website showed signs of revival, the average number of applicants per job also doubled in the first six months of 2020.
The report said that average number of applications per job posted on LinkedIn increased from around 90 in January 2020 to 180 in June 2020. The hiring sentiment at the end of June was also 15% lower than a year earlier, it added.
Although there were some signs of relief at the beginning of this month when CMIE data showed that the jobs situation in the country has returned to pre-Covid levels, with unemployment rate falling to 7.4% in July 2020 compared with 7.8% in February 2020, but that rebound proved to be short-lived.
Numbers started worsening in August again, as localised lockdowns across states started showing effects. Overall unemployment rate was recorded at 9.1% for the week ending 16 August, its highest level in nine weeks.
The outlook isn’t encouraging as well. A report by Asian Development Bank (ADB) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) last week said that as many as 6.1 million young people (15-24 years) may lose jobs in India in 2020 if the containment of the virus takes six months (roughly till September). The unemployment rate in such a case will rise to as much as 32.5%, it added.
The report called for urgent, large-scale and targeted measures to generate jobs for the youth, while keeping education and training on track to minimise future scarring of the working youth in the Asian region.
