Employment

Declining growth and a stagnating employment share of manufacturing in a high-growth regime in India are disconcerting, given the pride of place assumed by manufacturing as the "engine of growth." The sustainability of high growth is linked intrinsically to a trajectory that creates gainful employment. This paper argues that the manufacturing sector, which recorded declining employment elasticity in the organised sector, will not be able to mend the gap between growth and employment. Rather the goal of rejuvenating manufacturing has to be contextualised in a larger strategy of full employment with interventions related to demand structures, technology, size structure of firms, as well as a calibrated engagement with the global market.

Women's work plays a significant role in reducing gender inequality and is also seen to affect levels of fertility and child mortality. However, the relationship between female work participation status and autonomy and demographic indicators has not been clearly established. This paper attempts to bring out the conditions of women's work, status and their relationship with child mortality and fertility in a south Indian village. The aim is to explore the comprehensiveness of the term 'conditions of women's work' and how it reflects the entire milieu of a woman's situation.

This paper presents and discusses primary data from a survey of 1,070 households in four poor settlements in Mumbai comprising slum-and pavement-dwellers and squatters on the living environment and health conditions. The study attempts to examine the consequences of socio-economic and environmental factors in terms of income, literacy, sanitation and hygiene for morbidity. The needs of the urban poor and their priorities are seen to be hierarchial. They need first assurance of being allowed to stay where they are and then provision of basic amenities of toilets, water supply, sewerage and drainage.

The concepts and methods used by NSSO to net work and workers are not able to capture the work of the poor, particularly of women, satisfactorily. Since that part of the workforce which is not captured by the NSS surveys is not likely to remain stagnant and is subject to increases and declines, depending on the specific situation, it is possible that an increase in this part of the workforce may explain the decline in the worker-population ratio (WPR) in the nineties. The workforce in these 'difficult to measure sectors', such as subsistence work, home-based work or informal work, can be better captured through time use surveys. Using data from the pilot time use survey (1998-99), this paper shows that (a) this survey technique is capable of getting more realistic estimates of workforce and (b) some of the work not captured in the NSS surveys but captured in the time use surveys is likely to explain the changes in the employment situation in the nineties to a considerable extent.

This paper focuses on the impact of India's economic reforms on industrial structure and productivity. It reveals a disappointing overall performance in both output growth and employment. This, however, is not the result of exogenous factors,but the consequence of the type of policies being followed under economic reforms. If mistakes were made in the past, they need to be corrected. But efforts should be made to ensure that demand is high enough for more output to be produced, more people to be employed, poverty to be reduced.