Self employment declining in India, says a new government survey

Call it impact of economic growth or government’s rural employment guarantee programme, home based entrepreneurship in the last decade has declined in India, a new government study has found, Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jan 2, 2013, 20:06:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Call it impact of economic growth or government’s rural employment guarantee programme, home based entrepreneurship in the last decade has declined in India, a new government study has found.

A survey by National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) shows that self-employment declined in non-agriculture sector in 2009-10 as compared to 1999-2000 in both rural and urban areas of India.

The decline was more in rural areas, where the government had introduced employment guarantee programe (NREGA) in 2005, as compared to urban areas, the survey said.

“In rural areas, 49.3 % of the workforce was self-employed in 1999-2000, which decreased to 41.6 % in 2009-10 and in urban areas, the decrease in share of self-employed workforce was from 40.8 % to 39.5 %,” the survey of over one lakh households across all Indian states and union territories said.

A senior government official said that the decline was primarily as more people moved from self-employed to wage earning in both urban and rural areas. “The impact in rural areas was more because of NREGA,” he said.

The NREGA impact can be analysed from NSSO survey on employment, which said that wages for rural workers in real terms have more than doubled for casual workers and was much higher than wages for regular salaried employees.

A worker in rural India was getting Rs. 45.58 per day in 1999-2000, which increased to 55.03 in 2004-05, After NREGA was introduced the average daily wage was Rs. 101.53 in 2009-10. “The decline in self-employed workforce in rural sector is impacted by NREGA programme and other new opportunities in rural sector,” said the 12th plan document recently approved in the National Development Council meeting.

The decline in self employment in urban areas could be attributed to creation of new job opportunities, when employment in manufacturing sector increased by about 20 % in first half of the last decade and the declined by five percent in the second half.

The NSSO findings pose a new challenge for the government as more people are likely to seek wage employment in the coming years with job creation in many non-agriculture sectors such as manufacturing, mining and trade falling.

“The second half of the last decade witnessed a decline of about five million jobs in most of labour intensive industries,” the 12th plan document said and set a target of creation of 100 million new jobs by 2022 in manufacturing and emerging sectors such as information technology.

The NSSO survey also found that the decline in self-employment was more among women, then men in both rural and urban areas. “In both rural and urban areas girls over 14 years of age are either attending educational institutions or have withdrawn from workforce due to improvement in the family income,” the plan document said.

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

Catch every big hit, every wicket with Crickit, a one stop destination for Live Scores, Match Stats, Infographics & much more. Explore now!

Stay updated with all top Cities including, Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and more across India. Stay informed on the latest happenings in World News along with Delhi Election 2025 and Delhi Election Result 2025 Live, New Delhi Election Result Live, Kalkaji Election Result Live at Hindustan Times.