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Centre unveils draft national jobs policy
The Union labour ministry's draft policy aims to create quality, tech-driven jobs in India, prioritizing green careers and supporting the gig economy.
The Union labour ministry on Wednesday released a draft national labour and employment policy that stresses green and technology-driven career opportunities to ramp up earnings amid a widely reckoned view that job creation has not kept pace with the rate of economic expansion.
The draft, titled Shram Shakti Niti 2025, aims to foster skilled workers ready for newer work profiles in a “future world” that will be driven by technological changes, including generative and other types of artificial intelligence (AI), the draft states.
Creating enough “quality jobs” is a key challenge for the Modi government, which has envisaged spending nearly ₹2 lakh crore over five years to boost local manufacturing jobs. Quality jobs are generally said to be those that offer decent wages and formal work conditions, along with some form of assured social-security benefits. Most of India’s labour force are still tied to informal-sector employment.
The policy “repositions the Ministry of Labour & Employment (MoLE) as an Employment Facilitator, enabling convergence among workers, employers, and training institutions through trusted, AI-driven systems”, the draft states.
The National Career Service, a state-driven portal for job listings, will “evolve as India’s Digital Public Infrastructure for Employment, serving as the technological backbone for inclusive job matching, credential verification, and skill alignment”, the document further states.
The draft also states that the government would prioritise female workforce participation, social-security coverage to gig and platform workers and unleash a set of job-market reforms in three phases through 2030 and beyond.
By 2030, one out of every five working-age people on the planet will be Indian and this will necessitate creation of at least 115 million new jobs by the end of the decade, a recent report by investment bank Natixis SA projected.
According to the government’s Economic Survey 2024, India needs to create 7.85 million non-farm jobs every year until 2030 to absorb its expanding labour force, way higher than the current rate of employment.
Implementation will proceed in three phases; the first will span 2025-27band focus on “institutional setup, social-security integration, and NCS-DPI pilots for Al-based job matching”.
The next phase will cover the 2027-30 period for a nationwide rollout of universal social security accounts and skill-credit systems. Phase III will stretch beyond 2030 and will focus on consolidation, according to the draft.
India’s unemployment rate fell marginally to 5.2% in July from 5.6% in the previous month, according to the latest official Periodic Labour Force Survey.
The draft policy establishes a three-tier implementation structure: A national labour and employment policy implementation council; state labour missions and district-level labour resource centres. The national-level panel will be an “inter-ministerial body chaired by the Minister of Labour Employment,” the draft states.
On Aug 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the roll-out of a ₹1 lakh-crore scheme for new job seekers in an Independence speech that focused squarely on the need for self-reliance and local manufacturing to cope with “rising economic selfishness” in the world.
The Pradhan Mantri Viksit Bharat Rojgar Yojana will provide a one-time incentive of ₹15,000 to first-time private-sector job seekers, targeting approximately 35 million beneficiaries, Modi had said.
Modi’s government has pledged to make India a developed nation by the centenary of the country’s independence in 2047, which will largely depend on the availability of sufficient formal-sector jobs, analysts say.
