Economic Development and Employment Creation in India

Employment has featured as an important item in the development agenda in India. Approaches to the subject have, however, varied in different periods during the last over 50 years. In the initial years of development planning, unemployment was not expected to emerge as a major problem. Yet care was taken to see that employment of a reasonable magnitude is generated in the development process to productively employ the growing labour force. A reasonably high rate of economic growth combined with an emphasis on labour intensive sectors like the small scale industry was envisaged to achieve this goal.

To analyze the trend and to estimate the growth rates of the employment in different organized sectors of India, simple linear regression model and semi-log linear regression model have been fitted respectively to the data on the organized sector for the periods 1990-91 to 2009-10. The estimated value of the regression co-efficient, their standard error and other important results are given. Employment in mining and quarrying sector increased by 0.072 lakh persons per year. The manufacturing sector’s employment increased by 0.389 lakh persons annually.