30% of India’s workforce could be jobless by '20

NEW DELHI: India will have a prodigious 30 per cent unemployment rate in 2020 – a worrisome figure that suggests a country teeming with more than 21 crore jobless people.

The forbidding forecast has been issued in a study titled ‘India Labour Report’, carried out by TeamLease Services, a staffing and HR services firm.

The study suggests that the current population of Indians who will be of an employable age in 2020 will continue to hurtle towards a depressing future unless the present trends change dramatically.

Characterising the social catastrophe as the “coming unemployment explosion”, the report says India’s working population in 2020 will be equal to its total population of 1991, when India had kick-started economic reforms.

The unemployment explosion, the report says, will largely weigh down the youth. Nine out of 10 unemployed people are likely to be in the age bracket 15-29.

The study says the annual average growth in employment has slowed primarily because agriculture has failed to create jobs since the 1990s. The report concedes, however, that it is not agriculture’s business to create jobs.

The study contends that the history of development is a catalogue of instances in which people have been pulled out of agriculture and thrust into non-farm activities such as manufacturing and services. “In that sense, India has witnessed a failed industrial revolution,” the study says.