Rural employment

The government indeed has good intentions in creating jobs for rural India, but they never said how: the money is there, but what kind of jobs are they talking about to pay the people? Probably they are mean employment for the Bharat Nirman and related programs, but those are just infrastructure development projects and cannot sustain the large under-employed rural population. What we really is a better manufacturing sector. Globalization surely creates jobs through outsourcing and foreign investments, but for India, these jobs have been mostly restricted to the skilled and educated workforce. IT just employs 700,000 people at the moment, which is not even 1% of the Indian population. Add the meagre manufacturing sector, and even then you do not get anything more than 3%. Over 400 million people of India are under-employed, and the only way to get around this is by creating a larger manufacturing base. And most importantly, this manufacturing cannot be mediocre in any way. Look at how the Kanpur textile industry died out when the MNCs came in, and today we import almost 600 million $ of textiles from China. China indeed caught on to the offshore manufacturing bandwagon a long time back. Everywhere you go in the world, and even in India, toys are labeled as Made in China, decoration pieces are labelled as Made in China, clothes, and even the Diwali lights are labeled as Made in China. We really need to find more such niche markets and innovate for low cost manufacturing plants using the latest cutting edge technologies. The SSIs that died out when the offshoring wave hit the world have to be revived. When Liggat Papad can be such a success story, we surely have the potential to do great things if we do them properly.

The rural population has so far been untouched by globalization, but it should not remain as such. We have a tremendous manpower and huge labour market - we should turn that into an asset, rather than a liability. Only when we are able to integrate more and more of India into the economic cycle, it is only then that the poor can spiral ahead into higher income brackets and improve their standards of living. Infrastructure development is just a catalyst to growth, but the real growth lies in the development of other sectors. And once this growth begins, it will not just benefit the rural population, but the entire country because that is how economics works.

The following reports also raise similar questions about the rural employment guarantee scheme:
- BBC
- Atanu Dey