In the West, the rate of inflation and the unemployment rate are taken as an informal ‘misery index’, to indicate how rigid most common people are. For example, the US is currently in a worse position than India in terms of retail price control, which is a rarity. Its economic growth rate is also less than ours. But the gap between the people who work between the world’s two largest democracies is not just huge in appearance; We lack timely official data on this important metric. According to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the rolling average unemployment for the past 30 days stood at 8.1% from its April 24 estimate. Compared to a fall in the purchasing power of the rupee, this type of misery afflicts fewer families but affects more.
If the single-digit unemployment figure doesn’t sound so worrying, the CMIE data also points to a longer trend that needs to be reversed for that rate to better reflect reality. Eventually, India’s overall labor participation rate fell from 46% to 40% between 2017 and 2022. A large part of our workforce has dropped out of the job race in despair. This confirms the divergent findings of our youth who are unable to find satisfactory jobs and go back to farms on a large scale. Job generation needs more policy attention than it gets.