Need to incentivise job-intensive industries in India

“India is creating large-scale jobs. New members of EPF and ESI clearly show decent job creation, but this is inadequate for our needs,” Pai, a former board member of Infosys, said. “To boost employment, the government must incentivise employment-intensive industries like garments, textiles, auto and infrastructure and not capital-intensive ones as done hitherto,” he said. “Our wrong policies of favouring capital intensity instead of employment intensity has hurt us badly.” Pai said the government has taken many initiatives to generate jobs, but they are not bearing fruit as investment is down, especially in the private sector. 

“Agriculture has been stressed and that has pulled down growth,” he added. Pai made a pitch to reduce the number of people dependent on agriculture. Today, about 52 per cent of Indians depend on agriculture which, at 15 per cent of GDP, is growing at 3 per cent per annum whereas some 48 per cent are dependent on industry. The services sector is growing at over 10 per cent, Pai added. “The wide disparity in growth is creating greater divergence and social stress. There is a need for more than 30 per cent to shift to industry and services if their income has to grow. Agriculture can’t sustain such a large number of people as their primary source of income,” he said. Pai, a former chairman of SEBI Primary Markets Advisory Committee, also said formal jobs being created are inadequate to meet India’s needs. 

“I estimate that 6080 lakh formal jobs are being created every year which pay PF or ESI. This is against 1.8 crore who need jobs every year.”The chairman of Manipal Global Education Services and Aarin Capital Partners is of the view that sectors such as financial services are prone to technology disruption and automation, especially with many new start-ups coming up. “In banking, over the last 15 years, both assets and liabilities have grown by over 10 times, but employment by only five per cent. This is the result of automation and very high increase in labour costs,” Pai added.