The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) said that India has 53 million unemployed people as of December 2021 confirming women being in a huge proportion among them.
Out of these 53 million, 35 million are the unemployed who are actively seeking work, including 23% or 8 million women. While 17 million are those who are not actively seeking it but are willing to work, including 53% or 9 million being women in this category.
CMIE said, “India’s unemployment problem is not reflected in its unemployment rate. Its problem is the low employment rate and its discouraged young female labour force. India needs to immediately provide employment to the 7.9% who are in the unemployment rate or 35 million in December 2021 who were not employed and they were actively looking for employment.”
CMIE also noted that the World Bank had fixed the global employment rate at 55% in the pandemic hit 2020 or 58% in 2019 while that of India stood at a low of 43%. However, CMIE pegged India’s employment rate at 38%.
“An equally important challenge is to provide employment to the additional 17 million who were also not employed and were willing to work if work was available although they were not actively looking for work. To reach global employment rate standards India needs to employ an additional 187.5 million people,” CMIE said, adding that given the current employment of the order of 406 million that is a tall order.
