Unemployment a social issue


“Unemployment is a great tragedy. The man who goes about hopelessly seeking work to earn bread for his children is a living reproach to civilization.”


                                                         
(Carlos Saavedra Lamas)

A problem, an issue, and many other adjectives can describe the word “unemployment.” The problem of unemployment is not limited to certain individuals, states, or countries but it’s an issue, every country in the world is suffering from. Every government throughout the world is trying to tackle this issue, but the problem doesn’t seem to end. According to a report of BBC news, about 1.62 million people lost their jobs in the last three months i.e. July to September 2020 and many more are about to lose theirs in the coming future. 


What is unemployment?

Unemployment is a condition where people actively searching for jobs don’t find any. These people are called unemployed. Different measures are used to calculate the unemployment rate in different countries. It can be said “the less the rate of unemployment a country has the more prosperous it is”. Because unemployment at a place is inversely related to the health and economy of that place.
 

Types of unemployment:-


Frictional Unemployment- Frictional Unemployment is generally referred to as the gap period of leaving one job and joining the other one. It is a short-lived type of unemployment that doesn’t cause-effect for a long time. And it is also the kind of unemployment which requires the least consideration from us.

Cyclical Unemployment- The unemployment directly related to economic upturns and downturns is called Cyclical Unemployment. Here the unemployment increases during times of recession and vice versa. The government makes programs and policies to avoid the situation of unemployment during times of recession.

Structural Unemployment- When there are more labor and fewer jobs or there are jobs but not educated labor suitable for the job. Technological advancements decrease the requirement of labor in an economy causing Structural Unemployment. In a country like ours, where we have more hands to do the jobs than the actual jobs available Structural Unemployment is a big issue.

Seasonal Unemployment- Generally prevailing in the agriculture sector of the economy, Seasonal Unemployment can be referred to as the gap between sowing and harvesting of the crops. It can be found in other industries like wool as the people involved have to wait for winter for selling their products into the market.


Unemployment in India:-


Being a developing nation, India has different concerns and prospects of unemployment than the developed ones. Also, 63% of our population is currently in the working-age group i.e. between the age group of 15 to 59 years which is expected to rise to 68.24% by the year 2026. But having the highest working population in the world doesn’t help at all when there is the unavailability of jobs to provide these people proper or any employment. The unemployment rate has shot up to 27.1% being the highest unemployment rate so far the country has ever faced in the last four decades. And the situation doesn’t seem to be improving in the coming period as the entire employment system and industries have been affected badly in the past few years. But blaming any single aspect for the whole unemployment situation is not correct.

Let me tell you, why? In the year 2016-17 India’s growth was blooming which made it earn the tag of the fastest growing economy in the world. Even after being the world’s fastest-growing economy, the growth rate of employment in India didn’t seem to increase at that rate or we can say that the increase of employment rate is much slower than the rate of growth in the economy.

The whole scenario could be termed as “Jobless Growth” which became a huge concern of the economists at that time. And these concerns yielded results in the year 2017-18 taking the country’s unemployment ratio to 7.1, the highest in the last four decades. With this, the economy of the country started falling apart with the falling GDP growth, and now with the pandemic, the Indian job market has badly collapsed. 



Reasons Behind unemployment in India:-

Let’s discuss the reasons behind the whole unemployment problem in India in more detail here-


Overpopulation- The main reason behind the high unemployment rate is overpopulation as the country’s economy is not growing at the same rate as the rate of population growth. In fact, the rate of growth in population in India is much higher than the rate of economic growth of the country. Due to the high population and fewer opportunities, a large sum of capable people remains unemployed.

 
Dependence on the agriculture sector- In India, about 62% of the population is dependent on agriculture. Lack of facilities in the agriculture sector, poor policies, and unavailability of proper quality of technology make agriculture a risky source of employment. Where many times the crops fail making farmers indebted to big landlords for their whole lives. 


Loss of Cottage and Small-Scale industries- The availability of foreign cheap and durable cloth in the Indian market paved the way for the downfall of the cottage industry in India where all the work was used to be done by hands from knitting the fiber into cloth to making dresses from that cloth. As the manual labor costs more than the machines and is less precise, the Indian cottage industry started falling, and now a very few industries are left that do these hardworking. Making many people skilled in this sector unemployed.


Low and no savings with people- Most of the labor class in India earns daily and consumes that earned money on the same day and the cycle continues. Which ends them with having no or very little savings so in case if they want to start any small business in their future, they can’t. People of the labor class generally hold no properties that they can mortgage with banks and get loans for starting something of their own in the case of unemployment. This doesn’t let them develop and they continue to live in the loop of consuming the same day that they have earned that very day.


What Needs to be done?

Unemployment has presented itself as the biggest issue in the country. Which need proper solutions and measures from the side of government and also big business houses. Proper measures for the control of the population need to be taken. Besides that, there is an urgent need to make people aware of our handloom and handicrafts at a global level and encourage them to make these a part of their daily lives. Financial support should be provided to small-scale and cottage industries as they have the capability of providing enormous employment opportunities in the coming time. 

Having the greatest workforce is a responsibility proper utilization of which can pave the way for India from being developing to a developed nation.

(Author: Pearl Gupta) Why every day is father's day?
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