Employed poverty: Addressing the elephant in the room

India@100: “There are enough jobs in India, but the real problem is employed poverty as the wage is low,” said Manish Sabharwal, vice chairman, TeamlLease Services.

Sabharwal, along with Dhiraj Nayyar, chief economist, Vedanta and Laveesh Bhandari, president and senior fellow, CSEP, addressed a session titled ‘The Rush for Jobs: Who Will Employ Them All?’. During the conversation, the trio talked about some of the key challenges in the Indian employment landscape prevailing today.

According to Sabharwal, human capital is important for long term prosperity of a country and India is blessed with it. However, the real elephant in the room is the low wage offered by the companies in comparison to the global market.

Chiming in, Nayyar said that people complain of less number jobs while companies say that they are unable to find people with the right skills to fill the vacancies. “It is a paradox,” he added. According to him, what Indians mean by lack of jobs, is the less number of government jobs, today. The country’s population has a high affinity towards ‘sarkari naukri’.

On this note, Sabharwal commented that the fact that the government pays too high at the lower level of the pyramid and too less at the top level, makes it lucrative across the middle class.

Further adding to this, Bhandari said that the problem emerges out of the fact that there is a mismatch between the salary expectations of the graduates and the amount that companies are offering.

On the role of the industry in improving the scenario, Bhandari said, “When there was an IT boom, India had scarcity of talent to meet the market demand, but the industry reacted to it and several institutes and IT colleges opened up. But the industry is not playing that role today. However, we should not push the onus only on one industry. Every industry has the potential to generate jobs.”

On this note, Sabharwal said, “We need to urbanise and financialise India, and raise human capital to catch attention of the global companies in terms of investments. We have to make India perfect to draw foreign investments which will lead to increase in jobs.”

Bhandari concluded saying, “Extra efforts need to be made in this direction, which should not confine to subsidies.”