State of Working India 2019

State of Working India (SWI), an annual publication of the Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, aims to provide an evidence-based overview of the quality and quantity of employment in the Indian economy.SWI 2019, released in April this year, presents an update on the country’s job situation between 2016 and 2018. It followed closely the release of SWI 2018 in September last year, in order to “intervene in the debate over employment generation in time for the general elections in April and May 2019.” The report draws employment data from different sources, such as the now-defunct five-year Employment-Unemployment Surveys and the Periodic Labour Force Survey by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO); annual surveys by the Labour Bureau; and the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy, Mumbai.SWI 2019 proposes a National Urban Employment Guarantee Programme for towns with a population of less than 1 million, which would provide guaranteed employment to residents, improve the quality of infrastructure and services, give skills training to the youth, and strengthen urban local bodies. The report also proposes a Universal Basic Services Programme that would fill vacancies and eliminate shortfalls in the areas of public health, education and housing. The report underlines the need for an industry-related policy that would ensure a bigger role of the state to revive employment in the manufacturing sector, and a fiscal policy that could help alleviate the job crisis through employment programmes.