How India’s policies on workforce and employment have fared in 2021

As we head into 2022, India still lacks good quality data on migrant workers, rules for new labour codes that were passed in Parliament almost a year ago are yet to be finalised, budgetary provisions for the rural jobs programme have fallen short of demand for work and the government told Parliament that no committee has yet been formed to draft a National Employment Policy.

The unemployment rate in urban areas, which had seen a large exodus of migrant workers after the nationwide lockdown was imposed in March 2020, had decreased to pre-lockdown levels, at 9.4% in the first quarter of 2021, according to data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey. India’s economy is also seeing a recovery, with the gross domestic product growing at 8.4% in the second quarter of 2021-’22 compared to 7.4% during the same period last year.

But overall employment levels fell again from April to June, per Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy data, after several states imposed lockdowns to control the Covid-19 second wave. With the economic recovery, by November, employment nationwide had improved to pre-second wave levels.

But behind this improvement in employment numbers lie increased work and wage insecurity, with many workers falling back on more precarious self-employment or informal work, experts told IndiaSpend during the peak of the second Covid-19 wave in…

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