Nansi Mishra 00:01:06

18 million Indians turn 18 years of age every single year. And India has over 100 million people by some estimates who are surplus in agriculture. So India must create 20 million jobs annually to avoid the huge humanitarian crisis. Today we have Sridhar Krishna. A senior scholar at the Takshashila Institution, where he led the 20 million jobs project.

 

Watch my conversation with Sridhar as he highlights the state of employment in India and shares his recommendations for creating 20 million jobs every year in India.

 

Hi, Sridhar. Thank you so much for joining us on the Neon Show.

 

Sridhar K 00:01:49

Well, thank you very much, Nansi, for having me.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:01:52

So, uh, I want to begin our discussion with the reservation bill that Karnataka government was proposing, right? Can you please tell us more about the bill and what was government’s intention with that bill and, uh, what would have been the consequences or potential impact if that bill got, you know, finalized?

 

Sridhar K 00:02:11

Sure. I think it’s interesting that, um, It’s not new. First of all, I mean, what Karnataka government was trying to do is not new. Uh, states like Pradesh have, have attempted to do so, uh, earlier. And I think it’s about ensuring that locals find a place in, in the growth, um, that the state enjoys. So there have been, um, lots of progress in Karnataka in the information technology industry.

So, And, but, and, but people come from all over the state country to come and work here. Um, the attraction of Bangalore, I mean, I, I too come from another state. I, I grew up in Chennai. Uh, I went to Pilani to study and then in Bombay, but, but I’ve sort of, uh, grew up in Chennai and spent a significant part of my life there.

But why, why Bangalore? When, when I decided to move to Bangalore, it was because. It’s a cosmopolitan city. Uh, it’s a city that makes, um, makes you comfortable immediately when you get here and, uh, makes you feel at home, right? Um, and what Karnataka government was trying to do is to say that we want to reserve 75 percent of low end jobs and 50 percent of managerial jobs to people who are local.

And what they define as local at that point is, I mean, do I become After working here for 15 years, I think they did mention Kannadigas are the ones they want to sort of support. I think I understand their reasons for doing so. I think they want to make sure that people of Karnataka benefit from the growth that Karnataka has got.

But it has other repercussions. In every policy, I think we talk about, I think you spoke to Pranay a while back, and at Takshashila, one thing we talk about is like, you know, there are unintended consequences of every policy. And if this policy were to, I mean, be the case, then what will happen is that the number of people that organizations can hire who are local might then become limited.

You’re now not able to access. If you set up an office in Bangalore, you’re now able to attract people from all over the country because people will be willing to come. and join your company, just to join your company, they’ll move, they’ll migrate. But if you are forced to hire only locals and a significant percentage of them, then you’re going to limit the number of people that you can attract.

And that will impact, uh, the attractiveness of, you know, of Karnataka and Bangalore in particular as a place for doing business. So that’s my personal opinion on this subject. I understand the political compunctions that governments may have in order to bring such things to bear, but I don’t think it’ll serve the purpose.

See, we have to increase the size of the pie. We can’t keep Deciding, uh, we can’t keep shrinking the pie and then decide who to share it with. Yes.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:05:21

Yes. Yes

 

Sridhar K 00:05:22

I think that would be, uh, not a great idea.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:05:25

I think it would be very distracting for builders also, right? Because, um, already it is very difficult to build a business, right? And then there is one more distraction that you have to, you know, always be very aware of about the ratio, right?.

 

Sridhar K 00:05:40

Yeah I think like that, that can’t be the way we, you know, Run a business. I think we need to a successful businesses run by ensuring that you have the best people. You give them the best environment and you build a bit good business model and you go out and target your customers.

And I think, like, make sure that you’re once you treat your people well, and you’re able to like, you know, uh, deal with the issues in a sort of equitable manner, then you can focus on your clients and make sure that they’re pleased. So this would be a distraction. And I think, uh, it would, a distraction is actually quite a mild word.

It would be more than a distraction. It would actually, um, deter company. People will start thinking twice, um, about, uh, setting up new business in Bangalore.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:06:31

So anyway, when you are, um, doing your business well, and you will be creating lots of job opportunities. So you are in a way, as you said, increasing the size of the pie, right?

 

Sridhar K 00:06:41

Correct. I think that’s what it is, no? I mean, why do we, uh, have, in fact, even when you look at our intense competition that we have to get into colleges in India, the intense, um, amount of competition that we have to get into the UPSC and jobs, et cetera. All these are because of shortages, right? And, and instead, and then we, we’re all talking about whether this community should get this reservation or that, or how it should be split up.

I think there’s one thing to increase. I think, again, I just go back to it. Let’s just say, need affirmative action and I’m not, um, against affirmative action. I honestly believe that some states have done extremely well through affirmative action. And, uh, that’s been a positive thing for our country as a whole, but, uh, you can’t keep getting very, very micro about it then it becomes difficult.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:07:38

And how do you see the reservation thing overall? There are other kinds of reservations also like in Karnataka. Um, I recently noticed that I can travel in a bus. I don’t have to pay anything. So I think that is my initiative because we already have, uh,

 

Sridhar K 00:07:54

I would put some of those things as fairly harmless, right?

But one of the things that happens is that if you look at people on the road, um, you find that Women generally use public transport largely and men have motorcycles and, uh, other means of transport. This is broadly the demographic. I’m not saying no woman rides a bike or no woman drives a car. Of course, they do.

But the point is that largely women are users of public transport or would like to be able to use public transport or they walk on the streets to get to work. Now, um, providing free transport, uh, for women in, uh, buses in, in Karnataka, I think, uh, just reduces one friction point for women to be able to get to work.

Um, one, uh, Thing. Of course, you need this should not mean that you just have the same number of buses and then just make the buses more crowded and and all that. I think it’s it’s it’s important to also in along with it invest the money to you can’t just do that by inconveniencing passengers and just. Packing them into the buses, you need more buses.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:09:13

This is just one solution. We need so many.

 

Sridhar K 00:09:15

We need many more. We need many more. One of the things that women find difficult is to be able to get to work in a safe, uh, and comfortable manner. And, uh, I think providing access, free access on buses is just encouraging women to get out of the home.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:09:33

Yes, makes sense. And, and I also see that. Because I have lived in Delhi for like seven, eight years before moving to Bangalore. And now I, I’ll be completing five years being in Bangalore. And I see so many women working in Karnataka. Like I wouldn’t see women in like, I would see women in offices, but I wouldn’t see women on street working.

So I think that is one more positive thing that I think I get to see more in Delhi also.

 

Sridhar K 00:10:02

Yeah

 

Nansi Mishra 00:10:02

In the near future. And I think we know

 

Sridhar K 00:10:05

I think it’s, Bangalore is a fantastic place. I think like we’re all blessed to be living here, such wonderful weather, most, most of the year. And, uh, and I think we just need to keep it that way.

 

Sridhar K 00:10:17

We need to keep it as a great, attractive destination for business. Not just for startups. People,

 

Nansi Mishra 00:10:23

When we talk about Bangalore, people start talking about startups, right? There is so much more than startups in Bangalore.

 

Sridhar K 00:10:30

Oh, of course. Of course. Absolutely.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:10:32

So what are the areas where government or our country has done tremendously well and what are the areas which still needs our attention?

Like in, in one of your articles, you mentioned that India can’t afford to, um, ignore manufacturing. So why do you say that? And

 

Sridhar K 00:10:49

So before I go into manufacturing itself, I think it’s important to answer this basic question of what we’ve done well and what we’ve not. They have done very well in many areas, including like, you know, health. The day before yesterday, I, um, last week, um, at Takshashila, somebody ran a quiz asking people questions about what was, um, infant mortality in 1951. What is infant mortality today? What is, and so many things like that, little parameters, right? The percentage of girls who drop out of school, the women’s literacy in India at that time versus now.

In the last 75 years, I think tremendous, tremendous progress has happened in our country in a wide variety of areas. At the same time, I think there’s, uh, there’s something that’s happened in the last few decades. Which is also important. In the seventies, India used to grow at about Indian economy used to grow at about 2 percent per annum, you know, but our, uh, employment elasticity was 0.9, which meant that our employment also grew almost alongside the economic growth. Today, our employment elasticity is now down to 0. 087. It’s a 10th of what it was in the 70s, which means that we need to grow 10 times as fast for the same amount of economic progress. So if India needs, in my opinion, 20 million jobs a year, we have 18 million people who turn 18 every year. We have about, I used to say 100 million people surplus in agriculture, but another 70 million have joined agriculture in the last three, four years. Therefore, I believe we have 200 million people who are surplus in agriculture. So those people need jobs. So I think unless we create 20 million new jobs.

India is going to have huge, people keep talking about demographic dividend. No, we’ll have a demographic nightmare unless we fix this problem. So to me, that is India’s biggest challenge today. We need to create jobs, but how can, but you can’t create jobs by wishing them right. First, there has to be an acknowledgement that there is a jobs crisis, but there isn’t an acknowledgement that there is a jobs crisis.

Or at least there wasn’t. I saw, um, I just briefly glanced at the economic survey which just came out today. Um, they are talking about skilling and things like that as an important site. So I think jobs has definitely got some attention. I wrote in the Hindustan Times a couple of years ago, um, after the budgets that there is a jobs crisis.

Please acknowledge it, right? That was the title of my op-ed in the Hindustan Times two years ago, and I think it wasn’t acknowledged. We talked about how many times jobs were mentioned in the budget speech of the finance minister in 2022, and it was three times. Right. Only three times were jobs mentioned in the entire budget speech.

They talked about digital some 16 times in the same speech. Right. So, the point is what you get talked about gets done. Today they’re talking about jobs. Today I think like, you know, even during the current Lok Sabha elections, there was a lot of conversation around jobs. Um, but if you look at the PLFS data.

In the periodic labor, PLF, periodic labor force survey data, if you look at the annual one and end of last year, they say that, um, it says that our unemployment rate is 3.1%. Now, if you had unemployment of only 3.1 percent in a country like ours, jobs would not be a conversation anywhere. Politicians wouldn’t be talking about jobs. Right? Opposition parties wouldn’t be talking about jobs, they would be ignoring it because they’ll say like, man, the country is doing phenomenally well, let’s not talk about jobs. Right. People are not lying when they say jobs crisis exists. It’s a real thing. Right. If you look at CMI data, on the other hand, it says your unemployment rate is 8.5 percent at the end of June. Now, I don’t know what’s true. It all depends on how you count who’s employed, who’s not employed. Uh, 70 million people have, are supposed to have joined the workforce in the last, I mean, almost a hundred million people are supposed to have joined the workforce, um, in the last four years, but that’s not really, but out of them, like almost a, 80 percent of them are people who have, um, who have moved into agriculture, moved back to agriculture after the, after the pandemic, right?

Uh, they just decided it’s not worthwhile to go back to the city and do those jobs. Let’s just stay in the village and do agriculture. Agricultural productivity at the same time has obviously dropped tremendously as a consequence of that. So I think you have to also see, um, Labor productivity, labor productivity, uh, in India is like about 8 dollars an hour while in the U.S. it’s like some 100 dollars an hour. So I think that’s, uh, that’s a kind of difference that exists. So unless we move people out of agriculture, you need to have non-agricultural good jobs in India available. And that’s really the big fix that we need to make in our country. And that happens if you grow the economy.

So in order that so many jobs gets created, we need to grow the economy at over 10 percent per annum and increase employment elasticity to 0.4, 0.5, which means that it doesn’t mean that government comes out and says, okay, these are industries where, uh, employment elasticity is down. So no more automation in that area.

No more productivity gains in that area. No, that’s not the way to do it, right? So you’ve got to encourage, you’ve got to identify areas which have high, um, employment elasticity. IT services, 0.8. Construction, 1.15. So you look at industries like that and find out what are the bottlenecks for growth of those industries.

And try to promote, fix those bottlenecks there. Um, I think that’s what we need in order to sort of, uh, grow this, but there are many things which we need to do in order to do it. And I think, uh, there are ideas. Yeah. We can talk about them when you, when you come there.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:17:31

So Sridhar, we talked about unemployment here.

Yeah. I share a very, uh, recent incidents that happened in Gujarat. So there was this interview happening and job vacancies were 10, right? And, um, 1800 people applied for those 10 jobs and the interview was happening inside a hotel and hotel management couldn’t control that kind of crowd. And there was this stampede-like situation in the hotel.

So like, what’s this problem? Like, why is it happening?

 

Sridhar K 00:18:05

See, India has a huge unemployment problem. So clearly like there are very few jobs and lots of people wanting those jobs. I think that’s the bottom line here, but we need to solve this problem. While we do say that there are lots of job, um, uh, lots of job seekers and very few jobs.

ILO also had a report, which I read a few years back, actually, which said that India will have 29 million jobs, which will go unfilled because we don’t have the right skills of people to fill those jobs. Right? So we have that problem too. So there’s a huge skills mismatch. Most people who come out of college are unfit for any job.

Um, they, uh, And they just don’t have the skills which the market wants. So our education system and like the jobs are sort of not in sync. So I think that’s like one big problem. Um, if you look at, uh, people who are less educated, they all have jobs. But they have jobs which are underpaid. And like, uh, I mean, if you look at formal jobs, only some 14 percent of the people earn more than 20, 000 rupees a month.

Amongst the informal, casual labor, those kinds of jobs, about only 8 percent of the people earn more than 10, 000 rupees a month. So we have those kinds of situations where people who are not very skilled, not very educated, have some jobs. They take up whatever job they can get. They are not technically unemployed, but they have really bad jobs, right?

So I think we have that huge problem. So we have to fix some things, right? So what do we do? We can’t just keep like saying, yeah, we’ll just educate people. We’ll get them jobs. No, it doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to create. I think one is we’ve got to create. Manufacturing has typically been the place where a large number of people who are, who want to transition from agriculture to like, you know, non-agricultural jobs can come.

Agriculture employing 55 percent of our population contributes only 15 percent to our GDP. Right. So it’s obviously a very non-productive. If more and we have added another 70 million people to agriculture in the last three, four years. So I think that can’t, that’s not a that’s not a great place to go.

You’ve got to get people out into manufacturing and services. Services jobs typically end up hiring people who are. I think the good jobs and services and the growth in jobs and services has largely been in people with higher skills. Even manufacturing is requiring people with greater skills today than they did in the past.

But manufacturing nevertheless has an opportunity for people with low end skills to join. So how do we, so we cannot ignore manufacturing and say that we just leapfrogged this. India did. This sort of. Missed the manufacturing board due to some of the reasons we talked about, about the small scale sector, the labor, labor situation, poor infrastructure, etc.

Manufacturing didn’t take off. Now. Today things are getting better, but you know, but our focus is now gone into services and we’re thinking we just grow in services. That’s not possible. I think we need to grow manufacturing also. I think, uh, uh, So that’s something that I did write about on a sometime recently, I was reviewing a book written by Raghuram Rajan, um, on, uh, Ideas for the new economy. It’s called breaking the mold. And, um, and there I talked about, I mean, while Raghuram Rajan talks about India has to become for services, what China was for manufacturing. I agree a hundred percent with that. India should become, we are well positioned to do so, but it’s not a zero-sum game. You can do both. Right. So I think we need to look at manufacturing. We can’t afford to ignore it because we have a large number of people who are unemployed, unskilled, young, wanting, needing jobs and manufacturing is the first step for them. They can take if they work for the next 10 years in manufacturing, that’s fine.

Maybe they’ll shift to. Services afterwards, but the point is let them get some jobs today. So for that, we need to sort of push for our manufacturing. India is doing a lot of work in terms of PLIs, et cetera, in order to make that happen. This, um, performance-linked incentives, productivity-linked incentives.

But the point is that the idea intention behind it was to grow manufacturing, grow our capability, create some global leaders at the same time, increase our. Uh, number of people provide jobs for a large number of people. I don’t think that the PLI schemes that we have so far, huge amounts of money have been allocated for it, but I think if you’re talking about it as a potential for increasing jobs, that’s not happened.

Maybe today they might tweak. The PLI scheme to sort of make it more linked to job creation, but currently the way it stands today, it has nothing to do with job creation, right? So the incentive, somebody can come set up something and like, they’ll get those incentives, but it’s not connected to how many jobs they created.

So I think that’s a. That’s a fix that needs to happen. The other thing that we could do is like, you know, create new cities. All our big cities, capitals, cities of our country, of our various states are not in great shape. They have got overcrowded. They don’t have the right infrastructure for the amount of population that we’ve got.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:23:51

Because they were not designed.

 

Sridhar K 00:23:52

They were not designed to have this many people, right? So a great idea is to have like new capital cities built. And. New cities built, right? So I think new cities, it is well established that if you create new cities, um, you will create jobs in building the city. You will create new jobs because like more people come into that area, restaurants, service sector, all types of jobs get created when you create a city.

But people tried setting up some private cities in the recent past, like Lavasa, et cetera. They didn’t succeed. They were flops. Why? Because You can’t get like enough companies to shift there. If you don’t get enough companies to shift there, they’re not going to be jobs there. There are no jobs there. Why will come people come and just live there?

It can’t be a holiday resort, right? You need a place where people can actually go out and work for it to become a viable business place. In the past, people could set up things like Jamshedpur and Durgapur, et cetera, and all that. And those became towns of their own. But today those kinds of things don’t happen because both the man and the woman want to work and both. So two people in the home will have to get jobs, those kinds of ideas. So it will be difficult. But if the government were to move capital to another new place, that would create a huge number of people moving there. And therefore, create enough opportunities for other companies to set up there alongside it and go out and like, you know, do it.

So I think this idea of setting up new capitals for each state is a good idea. This one idea, which can work, it requires large amounts of cap money to be, you know, sort of deployed initially, but I think the benefits from it can be significant. India has a young population. Many developed countries do not.

They have aging population. So I think facilitating emigration to those countries is a great place to do. If work can’t come to India, then people can go there. So I think like, you know, facilitating immigration is great. India is already having some interesting conversations with Australia, a few other countries where they’re talking about truck drivers are being trained in India and being sent to Australia.

They meet those Australian requirements. Driving, et cetera, in order to go there. So I think if we can use AI and other aspects and understand what are all the jobs that are available in different countries and like, you know, find ways by which we can train our people to get those skills, acquire those skills and go out and apply for those jobs, that’s a, that’s a potentially a big one.

Um, I think access to credit has been a huge problem in our country. Um, 85 percent of SME, uh, MSMEs, uh, do not have their credit requirements met. They need money. They don’t get paid on time by the larger companies. Government is the biggest. Participants of this is on one side of it where many PSUs and governments have not paid MSMEs.

 

Um, the government, the, the budget last year or the year before sort of talked about how It would become an offense if, like, you know, MSMEs are not paid by private companies on time, but I think a large amount of money is owed to people from PSUs and government companies. So I think that’s something that needs to be done.

They need to get access to credit. You need to, like, you know, have streamlined the process of, you know, Offering credit, you cannot criminalize every failure to repay. It has to be dealt with as like, you know, was it, was the intention, right? Was the intention there to repay or was it just like, you know, failure to repay?

Um, I think those things have to be differentiated. You need, um, You need access to global markets. So therefore, like then there will be more access to credit. I think that’s important. You need to facilitate the gig economy. Like we said, we need to make sure that we don’t trying to come up with rules and laws, which sort of restrict the employment to such people, even though they’re not great jobs, there are some jobs today.

So we need those jobs too, before people can move on to something better. So they are going to be stopgap arrangements for the people, just like it is for those who employ them. And these are people who should like, you know, have time to skill themselves. But most importantly, I have an idea called career impact bonds.

These career impact bonds are used to finance upskilling. So all these things, like we said, require new skills to be acquired to be, because many of our companies are not able to hire people with the right skills. They want people to be differently skilled. So how do you do that? Somebody’s earning 10, 000 rupees a month as a lathe worker somewhere.

If he has to give up the job for three months in order to acquire new skills and become a CNC machine operator, he doesn’t have the resources to like take three months off. He needs to work. So what does he do? He doesn’t go for that training. But if somebody were to say, I’ll give you a loan, I’ll give you money, you go and do it, person might be tempted, say, okay, yeah, let me do this. Maybe I learned 25, 000 rupees with that new job. And I’ll be able to repay this loan. But then he worries that he might not get the right job. What if this training company doesn’t teach me properly? So all these fears. So I said, like, why don’t we give at risk loans to people to acquire skills. Which means they repay the loan only if they get a job, which pays them more than a certain amount of money.

And then you get a percentage of their future income over time, right? So this is not a new concept. This was established by a company called social finance in the U S it’s over a decade old recently, uh, Google. Put 100 million into a fund, uh, along with social finance to set up career impact bonds, which will allow people to go and acquire some Google certification for free, but have to repay only if they earn more than, say, 40, 000 a month.

I mean, per annum. Um, so That kind of thing will help in, uh, attracting finance to this kind of work. Now, the training institute doesn’t have unlimited money, unlike Google, which might have the hundred million dollars to just provide it. The training institute may not have the money to provide an at risk loan.

So they’ll have to pool all these loans and then sell it to a bank. And, and then you can create bonds out of it, which can then be, you can have multiple tranches in those bonds. These bonds can have senior tranches, which might be triple-A rated, 60 percent of the money may be in senior tranches because you expect that certain amount of money will come back.

Then they have the junior tranches where people take more risk. Then you have the equity tranche, which is maybe funded by CSR and government and others. others to do. So that way you can make upskilling a self-financing proposition, rather than saying that we have so much, so many new skills to train, new technology, new skills will be required every three years.

How can I go on spending tens of thousands of rupees on somebody to, and just provide free training. Today, the government has stopped the new economic survey has identified a bunch of skills that are required. Now, there’s no way the government can just provide these skills for free, right? I mean, there’s, there’s a limit to what it can do.

But if we create an environment where. Somebody can take a future lien on your income by like, you know, doing this today with Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, mobile, with that, you can actually track the income that goes into somebody’s bank account. And then if there is a lien given on it in a supported, protected by the law, then you have like a system which can work, which can add scale. Driven by market without the market saying that without the government or somebody sitting in some office somewhere deciding that these are the skills that people need. Instead, you have a situation where the market will see what types of skills get repaid, what types of training gets repaid, what types of training don’t, which institutions training Candidates are employed and which ones don’t get jobs, all that will decide where the money should go.

The market will then automatically decide where the money will go. And therefore everybody’s interests are aligned and, uh, people who are seeking new skills are not at the mercy of some, uh, fly by night training Institute, which is provide, which provides a certificate, but no training.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:32:25

So people need some kind of surety. One one such example for the situation can be, there are so many. Bright people who are already doing the jobs, but they think that there is better opportunities out there and they deserve those opportunities. Right? Uh, so they pursue MBA and like for the next two years, they are not earning. They’re just learning.

They’re not earning, but they only leave their jobs for colleges where they know that they will get placed, they will get placed, right? So people leave India, go to U. S., and then they do their MBA, and then they work there because they’ll be paying, uh, they’ll be getting good amount of, uh, salary, so they can, you know, pay back their loans, and then they come back to India because they know that They will get some kind of jobs, right?

 

Sridhar K 00:33:15

I mean, if you join an IIM or something, there’s no problem getting a loan, right? But on the other hand, if you were to join a small institute somewhere, there may be a problem. But even those small institutes might be able to get you jobs which will help you to go ahead. But if you got at-risk loans, you would do that.

But forget about, I’m not even talking about things like MBA, et cetera, these are like established programs for which probably money already exists. But I’m talking about somebody realizing that Python is a useful skill to learn. Now, let me learn Python. Now it might cost them some amount of money and they don’t have the money to pay for it.

Many things can be learned for free, but there are some things which are probably required you to go to some place and get paid. And learn it properly and is at-risk loans supported by financing through career impact bonds, I think makes this whole learning upskilling process a viable one. There’s a lot of conversation in this recent, uh, economic survey.

I just broadly looked at some six pillars that they’re talking about. And, um, and, and, and they, they talk about. Uh, expanding, boosting private investment, expanding MSMEs, agriculture as a growth engine, green transition financing, bridging the education employment gap, which we talked about, and building state capacity and capability, which also we sort of briefly sort of addressed.

Yeah, but these are, but building that education gap is very crucial. And the way to do it. In my mind, there’s no better way than to use career impact bonds.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:34:54

 

Hmm. And we also talked about, um, focusing more on other cities, other than the tier-one cities, right? And I think Chandrababu Naidu has done an amazing job with Hyderabad, because earlier tier-one cities like Mumbai and Delhi and Bangalore had those kind of opportunities.

He not only brought ISB to Hyderabad, he only brought Microsoft to Hyderabad, right? So, um, So people who can now just, they can study in Hyderabad and because we have Microsoft and there are other MNCs also who are now, uh, you know, getting established in Hyderabad, not in, they’re choosing Hyderabad over Bangalore.

 

Sridhar K 00:35:31

And now they’re talking about building a new capital for, uh, Andhra Pradesh, uh, elsewhere. So I think. Yeah, that’s what we need. We need like new capitals. We need like growth of tier two, tier three cities. We need better infrastructure there. And I think we need to improve women’s labor force participation rate. I think that’s very important. A large percentage of our women are not in the workforce.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:35:52

I think for the last two decades, this woman workforce participation has been declining. And I think Bangladesh is doing a better job than us in this sector. So can you share your recommendations how we can improve the situation?

 

Sridhar K 00:36:07

You talk about Bangladesh doing better. There was a brief period when we were worse than Afghanistan, right?

So I mean, when you think of it, put it in perspective, there’s a huge problem. Right. Today we are at 25 point something as our, uh, labor force participation rate for women. Men are at 74. 4, women are at 256. Overall, according to PLFS data, it’s 50.2 percent workforce, labor force participation rate. Overall, women 25.6. CMIE, according to CMIE, the labor force participation rate is even lower than 50%. Right now, that means only 50 percent of the people in our country are either working or looking for a job. The other 50 percent are not even trying. They’ve given up. They believe that I won’t get a job if I apply. Or they just, or maybe a few people will be very rich and they don’t need to work, but like a large number of people.

Just are not applying because they don’t see opportunities. So we have that problem. So that’s one. Number two, women situation is very poor in our country. It sort of increased steadily till 2000 and then declined. I think it’s also to do with economic growth. Um, there is, Um, there is a known theory that like in a country like India, where which has a very traditional, where we want our women to be at home and things like that, as the economic status of the home improves, people say, I mean, why, what’s the need for you to go to work?

If you’re very poor, the women go to work, if you become a little more affluent, you say, like, why don’t you just stay at home and like, look, look after the house. Why do you need to go to work? Right. I think that’s the sort of mentality. Uh, people at least from my generation, uh, are extremely guilty of, um, and, uh, I think like we have done that. That’s one part that I’m not talking about your generation, at least my generation, we were sort of, if there was not, you start saying like, you know, there’s enough money at home. Why do you need to go to work? Kind of mode, right? That attitude, that’s one big problem. And if the poverty is very high, then people say it’s all right. I mean, we have no choice. Then they let the woman go men in India. We don’t do much work at home. Globally, women do four times as much work in the home, unpaid work at home, as men do globally. In India, it’s 9.8 times. Women do 9.8 times as much work in the home as men do. These two things make it like, you know, if the income level in the home increases, it just becomes sensible for the woman to just say, Even if the people in the house are willing to let her go or wanting her to go to work or don’t have any objection or anything, she might just say like, what the hell?

I have to do so much work at home. Why should I go?

 

Nansi Mishra 00:39:11

Yes.

 

Sridhar K 00:39:12

So I think like that’s, uh, that’s, that’s one big problem that’s at the home government can do very little to solve that problem. Let’s be also realistic about it. What can the government do? We can make some speeches. We can talk about how it’s important.

You can like, you know, do all that, but like, you know, you can provide some rhetoric and things like that. If you look at the things that government can do, there are a few things. And one of them is to like, you know, spout some rhetoric and that’s something that they can sort of do. But the real thing is that there are other reasons are like, you know, women don’t feel safe at work.

Now, imagine I told you 90 percent of our population, working population in factories are working in organizations, which employ less than 20 people. In an environment where there are 18 men, uh, 19 men is like one woman going to feel comfortable working there in that environment. So that is why Bangladesh is successful because Bangladesh was able to attract large scale manufacturing, especially in garments, which employs large numbers of women.

Women feel comfortable working in organizations run by women. Women feel comfortable working in organizations where there are a large number of women working. So they feel safe, physically safe. I think that’s another reason why structurally we have a problem because of our lack of attention to large scale manufacturing, our intention to keep things small, our ideas of promote reserving things for the small scale sector, all those things have sort of structurally kept this difficult for India.

And therefore, you have a situation where women’s labor force participation has been traditionally low. Right now it’s low because of some good things that have happened. That is economic growth, but nevertheless, it’s quite bad. And the amount of GDP that we are losing, because we don’t have this large number of people who could be at work or not at work is tremendous. It could change the prosperity of our country at a different level. It has been shown that when women earn money, they educate their children. When women earn money, the healthcare, they provide money for healthcare. When women earn money, the home is. Much better off, right? But that’s not the situation in most of our homes.

Many of us, including my generation, and even me at some level, are guilty of like, you know, not being supportive enough, right? Or maybe actively sort of dissuading greater progress. So I think that’s, that’s a big problem in our country. And I think that’s there. So there was safety, there is um

 

Nansi Mishra 00:42:01

I”ll just share an example that, um, my mother-in-law, she got selected for Air India before her marriage. And, uh, but by that time she was about to join, her marriage got fixed. And then there was this hurry that she should get married because now the rishta is fixed, right? She moved to Meerut. From Ahmedabad and then she thought that she already got the job with Air India. So maybe she’ll try after a year, uh, and she’ll get placed with some other airlines.

Right. So she didn’t join the job. And then, um, uh, marriage happened. And in just one year, uh, she got a baby also, and then she got occupied and like, everything was good because, um, Uh, the family had their own business, so they were doing really well. They didn’t need, uh, her to work. Right. The same situation Yeah.

As you mentioned. But after some time business, uh, started, um, you know, reclining, um, they had huge loans. And then now when I look back and I think about that situation and I think that if she had joined that job then I don’t think there would have been so much financial pressure on the family. And just think about her career. Like someone working with Air India for like 30-40 years. It’s just an amazing opportunity she missed. Right.

 

Sridhar K 00:43:23

 

Yeah, that’s what it is. And I think like, you know, we need to change. I think like, you know, one is structural types of organizations, types of industries. That’s something that can happen, um, improve safety, security, comfort, uh, to go to work and come back and all that. But I think at the home level, uh, there has to be big social change. Social norm has to change. And that’s, that’s hard. So I think that’s basically in terms of like, you know, there are various ideas for improving jobs and like, and I think we have to, of course, this is besides the standard ones. I’ve not mentioned the most obvious ones of better infrastructure, ease of doing business, doing all those things like, you know, uh, bankruptcy laws, um, courts providing justice quickly, um, compliance requirements, regulatory pressure, corruption, all those issues all keep make it hard, but.

Um, some of these changes can make a difference.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:44:30

Keep seeing the amazing work Takshashila team does like, um, their Instagram reels. They are so informative. It just shows how much effort they put to educate people, right? And so many, um, sessions, webinars you guys keep doing. And then we have so many reports on the website.

And I’m also going to, uh, share the link of 20 million job project, uh, in the comments so everyone can read the comment and they get to know what you guys are doing and, um, not just the good things. We should also have an idea of the overall picture we have about our country, so we know how, what to contribute, how to contribute.

 

Sridhar K 00:45:09

It’s our country, we have to work towards making it. Transforming India is a marathon, as somebody says.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:45:16

Not everything can be done on government level. Like you mentioned about the women’s participation situation, that there are things that are in our hands also.

 

Sridhar K 00:45:24

Yes, indeed. It is indeed. There are many things that we can do.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:45:28

Thank you so much for joining us on The Neon Show. It was lovely chatting with you and there was a lot I learned and I’m sure our audience will also learn a lot from your journey and the insights you shared.

 

Sridhar K 00:45:38

Thank you very much, Nansi. I really enjoyed talking to you.

 

Nansi Mishra 00:45:41

Thank you.