India’s first National Employment Policy to create more jobs

A senior government official has said the process of selecting the members of the committee has begun. The committee is expected to be made up of personnel from stakeholder ministries and academia, representatives of employers and trade unions, as well as labour experts.

“The new committee will be notified soon. We hope to put in place the first draft by next fiscal,” the official said, adding that the policy will be based on the data from employment surveys presently being conducted.

The policy is expected to consider the jobs estimated to be created under the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme across a dozen sectors, including the rising number of gig workforce and platform workers in the country.

The policy aims to create an enabling environment for attracting new enterprises and industries to generate employment opportunities and, at the same time, improve the skill sets of the existing labour force to make it more employable and competent enough to match global standards with special emphasis on increasing the headcount of female workforce, said the official.

The push for the policy came from the loss of millions of jobs due to the pandemic, raising the overall unemployment rate to alarming levels.

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Last year, a group of ministers, led by then social justice & empowerment minister Thawar Chand Gehlot, had suggested that the National Employment Policy should lay out a sectoral roadmap with incentives for employment generation.

Even though a dedicated National Employment Policy was first mooted in 2008, no concrete follow-up has happened till now, according to The Economic Times.