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About 52 out of hundred people in the country are not employed, the Union Labour Ministry told Lok Sabha on Monday. Despite reports of high unemployment and wage cuts during the lockdown, the Centre received just 2,395 complaints from aggrieved citizens on the Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS), a system to monitor wage loss and denial of wages.
Union Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar told CPI(M) MP PR Natarajan in a reply that as per the results of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) during 2017-18 and 2018-19 and the Annual Employment-Unemployment surveys conducted by the Labour Bureau, the Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and unemployment rate for persons aged 15 years and above is 47.3 per cent and 5.8 per cent.
‘Aatmanirbhar relief’
Gangwar claimed that the Centre is taking measures to check unemployment and it had announced a package of ₹20-lakh crore as part of the Aatmanirbhar financial package to create employment opportunities for workers of unorganised sector, strengthen the MSME Sector and promote rural economy.
“It includes many initiatives undertaken as part of structural reforms for these sectors which, inter alia, are deregulation of the agricultural sector; change in definition of MSMEs; new PSU policy; commercialisation of coal mining; higher FDI limits in defence and space sector; development of Industrial Land Bank; revamp of Viability Gap Funding scheme for social infrastructure; new power tariff policy and; incentivising States to undertake sectoral reforms,” Gangwar said.
Trade unions said the Centre is concealing the real data of unemployment and under employment. “These measures announced by the Minister are the real reasons for unemployment. It has not made any impact on the economy,” said CITU general secretary Tapan Sen. He said the WPR is one of the worst in history, even if it does not consider under employment.
“There are a lot of casual and daily wage employees. They do not have employment throughout the year. The Centre is not considering this level of destitution,” he said. He added that more than 14 crore people lost their jobs during the lockdown and most of them lost jobs without a retrenchment letter. “The government is suppressing figures,” the former Rajya Sabha MP said.
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