Plenty of work, but far fewer jobs

The NEET paper leak may have triggered the recent student uprising but it would be a mistake to imagine the protests were mainly against the mismanagement of examinations. The frustration and anger manifest in these protests stem from a deeper anxiety.

For millions of young Indians, these competitive examinations are among the few remaining routes to secure, reasonably paid jobs. When the integrity of these exams is compromised, it can mean waiting another year before you can even make another attempt. So, even from the get-go, these protests were as much about jobs as about examinations.

Government competitive examinations have become a waiting room for graduates. Young people in their early 20s spend years in coaching classes and rented rooms, making repeat attempts to clear exams where the success rate may be one or two per cent. These are prime years in which they could have acquired work experience, workplace skills, savings and professional networks.

The waiting is not irrational because entry-level salaries in the private sector have stagnated for a long time. The average monthly earning of a young male graduate fell from Rs 21,800 in 2011 to Rs 19,573 in 2023, even before adjusting for inflation.

A government job offers much better pay, continuity, health benefits, social status and protection against job loss. At an individual level, waiting is therefore a rational response. But the collective outcome is a considerable waste of human potential.

Between 2004 and 2023, India produced roughly five million graduates every year, but graduate employment increased by only around 2.8 million a year. Even fewer obtained salaried employment. Millions are either unemployed or working below their qualifications or in the waiting room for the elusive government job.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey reported an overall unemployment rate of 3.1 per cent in 2025 and youth unemployment of 9.9 per cent. But the ‘usual status’ measure can classify a person as employed even if s/he undertook a subsidiary economic activity for only 30 days during the previous year. Someone helping intermittently on a family farm, doing occasional delivery work or earning a small amount through self-employment may thus be statistically employed without possessing a stable livelihood.

That is why the employment debate must go beyond the binary distinction between employed and unemployed. Underemployment, disguised unemployment, irregular hours, low wages, absence of contracts and lack of social security are equally important.

Agriculture offers the clearest illustration of underutilisation of human capital. Its share in employment, after declining for several decades, rose from 44.1 per cent in 2017-18 to 46.1 per cent in 2023-24. This reversal reflected pandemic-era migration as well as the inability of manufacturing and services to sufficiently absorb workers.

Agriculture produces only about a sixth of national output but supports more than two-fifths of the workforce. The family farm is often an employer of last resort. The latest PLFS shows a slight decline but that could be because of a change in measurement methodology.

The wages picture is more revealing. The average daily earning of male casual workers remained practically unchanged at Rs 455 in 2025, compared with Rs 456 in 2024. The earnings of female casual workers rose from Rs 299 to Rs 315. These are nominal figures, before accounting for the rise in living costs.

The spread of platform work must be understood in this setting. A recent promotional offer advertised an hour of domestic help for Rs 29. This was a cut-price offered to the customer, not the wage paid to the worker.

Indeed, workers interviewed by a leading digital news publication reported monthly earnings that were often better than those available in traditional domestic work. Yet it also revealed rigid limits on leave, penalties, unpredictable breaks, long working days and close supervision through the app. Workers said they couldn’t take leave even during emergencies or eat at regular hours.

Platforms perform a useful economic function. They reduce search costs, match customers and workers quickly, create new services and can bring some transparency to informal labour markets. The policy response should, therefore, not be to obstruct the gig economy. But describing workers as ‘partners’ cannot by itself settle the question of responsibility when the platform controls access to customers, working hours, ratings, penalties and continued eligibility for work.

Precarity is also appearing in jobs once regarded as secure. In IT, layoffs occur through reduced bench periods, performance improvement plans, skill-based exits and encouraged resignations. At the same time, researchers and engineers with scarce AI expertise are receiving exceptional salaries and stock awards. The labour market is becoming more unequal: extraordinary rewards at the frontier but greater insecurity in routine coding, testing and back-office work.

This suggests that India must prepare for a future where there may be plenty of work, but fewer conventional jobs. A job traditionally implied a continuing relationship with one employer, a defined salary, predictable hours and some measure of social protection.

Work in the future may increasingly be organised through projects, assignments, platforms and multiple short-term engagements. The gig worker, broadly defined, may no longer be a small or exceptional category. Flexible working arrangements could become the norm for a substantial part of the workforce.

Such flexibility can enable women with care responsibilities, older people, migrants and skilled professionals to participate on terms better suited to their circumstances. It can encourage entrepreneurship. But without an appropriate framework, flexibility for the employer can easily become insecurity for the worker.

India therefore needs two objectives simultaneously: an environment in which the gig and platform economy can flourish, and a framework that makes such work ‘decent’. Social-security benefits must become portable across employers and platforms. Platforms should disclose clearly how remuneration, ratings, work allocation and deactivation decisions are determined.

Workers need accessible grievance mechanisms, timely payment and protection against arbitrary exclusion. The law must preserve genuine flexibility without allowing the terminology of ‘partnership’ to eliminate every employer obligation.

It is in this context that India’s abstention from the ILO convention on ‘Decent Work in the Platform Economy’ does not bode well. The International Labour Organisation’s Convention No. 193 is the world’s first legally binding treaty targeting app-based and digital platform work. The representatives of both Indian workers and employers reportedly supported the convention, while the government delegate abstained.

The government’s choice raises concerns because India’s domestic gig workforce is expanding rapidly, yet there is official reluctance to commit to binding global standards on algorithmic transparency and worker reclassification.

India certainly needs more employment. The policy challenge is to protect workers, to ensure that a labour market based increasingly on assignments, contracts and platforms does not leave workers without income security, bargaining power or social protection. Otherwise, the waiting room will continue to fill.

Ajit Ranade is a noted economist. More of his writing here

Article courtesy: The Billion Press