More Indians prefer salaried jobs over self-employment
When factory owner Amit Nagpal closed shop and joined a call centre on a fixed salary, he joined a growing trend in urban India where self-employment has become an untenable career option.
When factory owner Amit Nagpal closed shop and joined a call centre on a fixed salary, he joined a growing trend in urban India where self-employment has become an untenable career option.
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More and more Indians opted for a secured and salaried job, revealed an analysis of the country’s self-employment figures between 2004-05 and 2011-12. But, at the same time, the rate of employment fell by two percentage points in urban areas.
“It is not easy for a starter to survive with my own business because there is tough competition in bigger cities. There are costs such as regular payment to local authorities which one may not take into account while starting a business,” 34-year-old Nagpal said, explaining why he closed his factory in Badli industrial area and joined Gurgaon-based call centre.“Moreover, I did not have deep pockets to give competition to well-entrenched businesses in my field.”
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The highest dip in the number of self-employed people was witnessed in cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Indore, Nagpur and Agra, a new government survey shows. However, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Kanpur and Kolkata were exceptions.
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The highest dip in the number of self-employed people was witnessed in cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Indore, Nagpur and Agra, a new government survey shows. However, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Kanpur and Kolkata were exceptions.
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The numbers underscore the Narendra Modi-led NDA government’s focus on creating newer and more employment opportunities as the BJP won 84% of its seats in urban areas in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections riding high on the promise to create 100 million jobs. The figures also frustrate the government’s efforts to soar up the economy through its Make in India initiative.
The survey shows an overall fall of around 2% in urban areas but a comparison gives the micro-picture: around 37.9% people in big cities were self-employed in contrast to 44.9% in small towns. The highest dip was noticed in Bhopal, where the percentage fell from 53.3% to 30.9% from 2004 to 2012, says data from the National Sample Survey Office, while Nagpur witnessed a fall of 18 percentage points. Agra, Vadodara and Nashik saw falls in self-employment of about 10 percentage points and above.
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.
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