In Quest of Decent Work: Employment Quality in India

The labour market in India is undergoing a transition over the last three decades. While structural adjustment since the 1990s expanded the labour market, especially during the first few years of the new century, most of the new jobs were casual in nature. Thereafter, the story has been mostly that of a jobless growth, even job-loss growth in the 2011-2021 decade. In this paper, we have explored the situation in India in terms of employment quality and decent work deficit using NSS and PLFS data over the last two decades. While the foundation is ILO’s decent work framework (Anker et al, 2002), we have expanded and modified that to some extent to suit the available database in Indian context. Apart from aggregate situation, we have examined the pattern and trend across region, gender, social group and education. Our result shows that the situation in the country is far from satisfactory in terms of Employment Quality and there is substantial Decent Work Deficit. The only silver lining around this dark cloud is that Decent Work deficit is coming down during the 2011-23 period after a slump during 1999-2011 period. EQI is increasing and the proportion of workers in the two bottom-most groups have come down.