The problem is double-edged – on one end, they are increasingly being divorced from their traditional livelihoods through state-sanctioned dispossession, and on the other hand, a worsening labour market with far and few decent employment opportunities renders them unemployed. Reports have called the youth a drag on the Indian economy because of the rise of working-age youth with no jobs in sight. This, even as the government and the civil society either lament that it is the mindsets of young people who do not want to be entrepreneurs and rely instead on government jobs or that the young lack skills to be employable
https://thewire.in/labour/skill-india-unemployment-iti-apprenticeship-jobs
Scholar Santosh Mehrotra while analysing India’s employment crisis, notes that since 2012, there has been an increased share of informal jobs with less than one year’s contract, even in the government and public sector which has led to an increase in the disheartened labour force and educated but unemployed youth. Aspirations in young people for jobs in the public sector have remained, notwithstanding the contraction of public sector employment since the 1990’s opening up of the economy. This marks a sea divide between lived experience of young people and the narratives peddled by the government leading to large-scale resentment and anger in young people.
A resource-rich state like Assam, in Odisha people lose land for state interests and with it, their livelihoods. The poor are displaced from their lands, and the poor are called on in a declining employment scenario in the country to protect corporate interests to join the police and the army. It is, curiously, also resource conservation efforts that displace people from their livelihoods. In Chilika Lake in Odisha, the fisherfolk who rely on fishing for a living lament on how the no-fishing boundary implemented by the state leaves them high and dry with declining community access to the lake. This, apart from the expansion of commercial aquaculture, puts traditional fisher folk in peril. They imagine they will have to move to daily wage labour, letting go of their age-old livelihood practice. Some of them already work in a nearby factory for a paltry wage. They look towards the ITIs for the skills their children would require to get a job in the industries.
by Priyanka Krishna and Bhawna Parmar
07/03/2024