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Earlier in April, the Centre for Sustainable Employment, of Azim Premji University in Bengaluru released a report that grabbed national headlines. It reported that though no causal link could be established, about 50 lakh men had lost their jobs from 2016-2018, the same period that saw demonetisation and its aftermath.
The first few months of 2019 have been particularly busy for economists and experts on unemployment data as a leaked government report found that the rate of unemployment was at a record low. Then came the government’s defences and explanations citing different parameters of measurement, different data sets, and more.
To get down to brass tacks, The Quint caught up with Amit Basole, lead author of the headline-grabbing report State of Working India 2019 that investigates a few unemployment trends through data and also suggests solutions and alternatives for the government moving forward.
Basole said, “What we find in the data is that there is a decline in the percentage of men who report having work. When you withdraw a large amount of currency in circulation, it affects the running of informal businesses in terms of buying their inputs, paying their workers, customers who might want to buy from them, all of this gets affected. And that in turn affects the availability of work in that economy.”
“The unemployment rate in India, which is higher for educated people in general, is much higher for educated women than it is for educated men. So, in some states in india, it can be as high as 3 times the general level of unemployment.
If the general rate is 5%, it might be 15, 20, 25% for educated women. So that is actually the group that is most affected by the lack of good employment opportunities,” said Basole.
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