Jobs dry up in metros, towns flush

According to a Delhi government study, metros have handed over their mantle of being employment havens to small towns, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 30, 2007, 03:16:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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It’s a role reversal that is quite unexpected. Metros have handed over their mantle of being employment havens to small towns, according to a Delhi government study.

The study by the Directorate of Statistics, Delhi government, on the basis of National Sample Survey Organisation’s surveys, raises the all-important question of whether employment avenues are closing down in metros. The probable answer is yes.

And while the metros stagnate, emerging metros and other million-plus cities are generating more employment as they have a more entrepreneur-friendly environment, says the study’s author Dr BK Sharma.

The employment rate of cities like Agra was poor compared to most metros in 1993. A decade down the line, in 2004, they have a better employment rate than the big cities. The reasons for this are many.

For one, many cities, like Bhopal, are providing self-employment, which in big cities like Delhi and Chennai has gone down. In Bhopal, 25 per cent of the workforce is self-employed. In Hyderabad, there has been a jump of 13 percentage points in self-employment since 1993.

Another reason is that women have a better chance of getting jobs in small towns than in cities. The employment rate of women in Jaipur, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kanpur has increased at a faster pace than for men.

The study says that employment in all metros except Mumbai has fallen between 1993 and 2004. For Delhi, it has gone down from 796 per 1,000 persons to 714, for Kolkata from 803 to 751. Mumbai has witnessed a marginal improvement from 773 to 786.

Ironically, the Directorate says the closure of polluting industries, on Supreme Court orders, is to blame for upsetting the growth tempo in Delhi. Dr Sharma, in a paper presented at an NSSO seminar on Monday with N.T. Krishna, says Delhi may not be able to sustain its present level of employment because of its aim to attain international city standards.

The study says the imbalance is a message to the government to strike when the iron is hot and strengthen infrastructure and law enforcement in smaller towns, which are growing at a much faster rate than anticipated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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