Most countries, developing and developed, are facing an acute problem of generating enough quality jobs for their youth, and are searching for new policy solutions. India’s problem is the largest. Here are five major drivers shaping the Indian jobs’ market

1. Fixing India’s Jobs Machine
Analyzing Drivers Shaping the Jobs
Market

2. Most countries, developing and developed, are facing an acute problem of generating
enough quality jobs for their youth, and are searching for new policy solutions. India’s
problem is the largest.
At least five major drivers are shaping the Indian jobs’ market

3. 1. Technology
Automation and artificial intelligence
are making people increasingly
redundant in production and services
industries. What will human beings do
in these “Industry 4.0” scenarios? This
is the question that International
Labour Organization’s Future of Work
project is grappling with.

4. 2. New Forms of Enterprises
Uber and Airbnb have changed
the transportation and hospitality
industries. Such disrupters are
creating new opportunities for
people to earn, learn and to be
masters of their own businesses.
Whether these new forms of
enterprises will create more or
less employment overall has not
been established. What is clear is
that they are changing
“employment” relationships.

5. 3. Social Security
Flexible employment arrangements with the expectation that
they will increase the numbers hired, are raising issues of
fairness.
• How will employees look after their families’ needs when
their incomes are uncertain?
• Will the state provide the social security? If so, should it not
tax employers, who make profits from the flexible
arrangements?
When there is demand in India to provide for social security
even for domestic workers, the society will not let off business
owners easily from responsibility for providing social security
for workers engaged in their businesses, whether they have
formal employment contracts or not.

6. 4. Skill Development
With rapidly changing industry patterns, should not India also
prepare for Industry 4.0 like advanced industrial countries?
Processes of skill development will have to be more
dynamic, with much of the development of skills “on the job”
and within evolving enterprises.
The complication is that businesses which do not want to
have long-term employment relationships may not want to
invest in the development of the skills of their workers.
This will require a paradigm shift in policies for skills
development.

7. 5. Enterprises
On the one hand, there is a cry that
entrepreneurs must be made free of
regulations, so that they can innovate and grow
their enterprises. However, there is a need to
compel enterprises to invest in skills and social
security.
Over-regulation or wrong regulations will cramp
enterprises and will reduce employment. But
too little regulation, or bad regulation, will lead
to a damage to public goods—the environment,
the availability of skills in the market, and trust
in enterprises.

8. The interplay of these principal drivers will determine
whether there will be enough good jobs for the hundreds of
millions of young people who will be coming into the
Indian jobs market in the next few decades