State of Indian work force

Rediff has an article about an employment report on the Indian labor force. This report is for the 2004-2005 year. Given that the topic is not related to movies or cricket or how people in Bangalore and Mumbai are buying a gazzillion BMWs, I was surprised to even find it on Rediff. This report was commissioned by the 'Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation' (just the name makes me want to work there). Don't let the name fool you. Their Press Release of this report is very succinct and informative. A must read in my opinion. Here are some interesting tidbits with emphasis added by me.

"About 11 per cent of households in both the rural and urban areas were headed by females. Compared to all households, they had, on an average, a relatively smaller household size and a much higher sex-ratio."

Confirms anecdotal evidence from Kerala.

"About 42 per cent of the population in the country were usually employed. The proportion was 44 per cent in the rural and 37 per cent in the urban."

58% of the country is not usually employed! Think about it. In the US when the unemployment rate reaches 10% there is a national crisis. Are they counting different things?

"The unemployment rate (number of person unemployed per 1000 persons in the labour force), according to usual status (ps+ss), was 17 in the rural areas and 45 in the urban areas. The unemployment rates for females are found to be higher than that for males, and highest among urban females."

Say what? There is more employment in rural than in urban India?

"In both the rural and urban areas, unemployment rate among the educated (secondary and above) was higher than that among those whose education level was lower than secondary."

Oh, now I get it. Our distaste for manual labor.

"In rural India, the proportion of ‘all’ male workers engaged in the agricultural activities declined gradually from 81 per cent in 1977-78 to 67 per cent in 2004-05. For ‘all’ female workers, the decline was less - from 88 per cent in 1977-78 to 83 per cent in 2004-05."

So women are taking up agriculture work as men move to cities?

Mission 2007, no really

When I first read about Mission 2007 on rediff I had a sense of deja vu. An initiative for rural development with a grand sounding name. Hasn't this been played out a million times before? Lofty ambitions, grand launches and then complete silence. But as I went through the Mission 2007 website I realized that this initiative was not being launched now. It was launched in 2004. For whatever reason rediff chose to highlight it now. Which is a bummer because we are learning about it just 1 year before it ends. But in a way its good. Now that the end of the mission is not that far off we can atleast remember to follow up and see what worked and what didn't.

Btw, for those of you too lazy to click through the links, the mission statement of this Mission is

“Achieving sustainable human security is a priority task. This will call for harmony with nature and with each other. Knowledge connectivity within and among countries will help to achieve this goal. This is why we should make 'Mission 2007: Every Village Knowledge Centre' a success.”

It's easy to be cynical about an initiative that is run out of a Govt Secretariat and I am fighting hard not to fall into that trap. After all even if this is a half-hearted Babu driven initiative it will probably touch more people than we ever can - such is the power of Govt agencies. So who am I to complain. But (you knew there was a but right :)) I couldn't help but notice that the milestone page has a list of launches and conferences instead of real statistics like how many people in how many villages have they been able to touch so far. I hope it's a cultural oversight. They have a concept of partner organizations of which there are 242 as of today. Though it's a bit late in the game we might decide to join it. If that happens there will be more reports on this topic.