As the world recovers from the pandemic, and many across the country are trying to find their feet with gainful employment, a study released early this year by CMIE reveals that agriculture absorbed an additional 11 million workers over the last 3 years. The study also indicates a loss of 15 million jobs in the rest of the economy. Mahesh Vyas the CEO of CMIE, refers to it as “an involuntary reverse migration from ‘Factories to farms’”.
https://countercurrents.org/2022/07/securing-skilled-jobs-for-the-present-and-the-future/
Since the 1990s, India has largely witnessed an outmigration from rural areas to urban areas, leaving behind agriculture for more lucrative jobs, both skilled and unskilled, in cities. With frequent changes in farming policies, the vagaries of the monsoon, water insecurity and lack of financial support, agriculture has suffered, and people are migrating out of villages in search of better jobs. But the pandemic has reversed this situation as thousands of migrant labourers were forced to return home, and to farming, to survive. Although agriculture incomes are significantly lower than the urban jobs, it has become a reliable means to survival. The total number of people employed in agriculture in the financial year 2021 was nearly 152 million and this accounted for almost 40 % of the nation’s workforce. The CMIE report indicates a jump from 42.5% to 45.6 % in agriculture compared with total employment figures during 2018-2020.
This increasing shift towards agriculture sends a big message to decision-makers. While it clearly indicates that it is a response that is guided by distress and also frustrations dealing with unreliable urban jobs, it demonstrates the capacity of the agriculture sector to absorb and create a potential for survival. This further highlights the ambiguous nature of the manufacturing and the informal sector that largely operates on market demand, and which now is still far from complete recovery. A key take-away from this would be to strengthen, secure and imagine possibilities of bolstering a thriving agro-pastoral and cottage industry based sector well connected to high consumption urban centres, so that there is much higher viability to agricultural incomes.
24/07/2022
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