'New Labour Laws Won't Create the Millions of Jobs We Need; Already 20M Have Lost Hope, Opted Out'

Mahesh Vyas, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy CMIE.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-5cO21raEA

Indian Express article:  ‘We need a 5-year, 10-year plan to get labour participation rate (LPR)  right’
LPR It was around 50% till recently, then in around 2016-2017 or 2017-18, according to official statistics it came to 48% (we say it came down to 46%). Now, in recent times, it has come down to 43% in 2019-20, and now it is 41%. It went down all the way to 35% in April when the big lockdown hit us and it’s back to 41%.

The labour participation rate for men is of the order of 75% (72% according to us) and for women is 25%. That’s a huge difference. According to us, 72% of men are willing to work and only around 11% of women are willing to work.

If we are willing to live in the conditions in which we are right now, we require about 6-8 million jobs per annum. That’s going to be very poor. So the number of jobs we should be creating… what we should be doing strategically for a country is to say, “How do I get my labour participation year up to 60-65%?” Maybe a 5-year, 10-year perspective plan to get that right, and that’s how we will be able to exploit our demographic dividend. Otherwise we are letting it go by.