 You're watching News Made Easy and I'm Anandya Chakravarti and today I'm going to talk about one very simple thing which is how India's economy is actually going backward. We are being dragged back into the villages. Now what happens in any modern economy and historically has happened for the last 250-300 years across the world is that work in agriculture has reduced. The number of people are dependent on farming has reduced and people have moved from farming to factories. That is what has happened and along with that another thing has happened. Instead of casual work in which you're not certain whether you're going to get work again the next day, work has moved, jobs have moved to longer term contract. So even if it is a weekly wage or a monthly wage, there is a contract which gives a certain amount of certainty as to work that tomorrow I'm going to go back and do that same job. So these are called salary jobs or regular jobs with regular wages and that is the hallmark of any modern economy and that is what India was hoping to be right. Move from unorganized to organized employment and from agriculture to factories and to offices to service sector. But what are we seeing? What we've seen is that initially it looked like that dependence on agriculture is dropping. So if we look at the RBI's data from the 1980s, from 1980-81 if I take it to 2017-18 for which we have the latest data in 1980-81 about 70% of those who were working were dependent on agriculture. They were working in agriculture or allied services. By 2017-18 that has come down to just 42%. But has it been accompanied by more jobs? Is it that there were a lot of job opportunities growing? So people left farming which is a traditional safe habitat where people continue to work. If they don't have any work, have they moved to new jobs because there were new opportunities? No, that is not true because again if we look at RBI's own data we see the job growth in India throughout the liberalization period which began from the mid-80s sped up and accelerated as you know from 1991 the rate of job growth has actually fallen. So if I look at RBI's data and look at the annual rate of job growth throughout the 80s which is from 80-81 to 90-91 the annual rate at which jobs were growing was about 2%. In the 1990s which is 1990-91 to 2000-2001 that job growth rate dropped to 1.7%. Remember this is the beginning of the mega reforms, privatization, globalization, liberalization that is taking place and job growth has slowed down. What happens in the 2000s? You know that this is a mega growth here from 2003 to 2008. We know these were huge growth years and did that lead to higher job growth? No, between 2000-2001 and 2010-11 the rate of growth of jobs dropped to just 1.3% and what happened after that? We have 7 years of data after that RBI's assessment and RBI's estimates from 2010-11 to 2017-18 job growth was just 0.2%. So we are seeing people move out of agriculture but the overall rate at which jobs are growing is so poor that most likely many of them are falling out of the labor system altogether or are not getting regular work at all. So that is the interesting thing that we are seeing. Now that is where RBI's official data comes into place. So let us move to data from the private data collecting agency and publishing agency CMI Center for Monitoring India's Economy. And as you know, I have been using that data regularly. CMI collects employment data every week, collects and processes it and releases it. And every month it also looks at the changes by occupation, by gender, by education and publishes that as well. And what do we see in CMI's data? And this is an interesting thing that from 2016-17 when CMI started collecting data the number of jobs in India has actually dropped. It has dropped. If I take 2016-17 as 100 then it has dropped significantly by 2020-21. And this decline actually is not because of only COVID. I know you will say 2021 was COVID. We all know jobs were lost. But actually within 2 years from 2018-19 you can see it drops below that 100 level and starts dropping. And an interesting thing happens along with that. What happens? As initially as jobs decline, the share of agriculture continues to decline. As you said that RBI has also confirmed the data. But we see that till about 2018-19 the share of agriculture in that continues to drop. So if agriculture was 100 jobs in 2016-17 it continued to drop and then it takes a U-turn. It begins to rise again. It moves to 99 and then in 2021 it actually crosses that level. And this is a dangerous sign. It means that people are going back to agriculture because they don't have jobs outside agriculture. And agriculture means that this is disguised unemployment. I am going to come to that at the end of this show. But let me just compare the data for the last 2 months that has been released by CMI. And this is important because we know that there was a revival in the economy in jobs in January, February and then the second wave came in March. So March, especially April, May, June you have seen a decline and then there was a revival in July. There has been a significant revival in jobs in July. What 16 million or 1.6 crore new jobs were created in the economy in July compared to June. And where did it take place? Is it that these are good factory jobs, manufacturing jobs? No, because in manufacturing there was a drop of 7.7 lakh jobs. So even though the number of employment opportunities went up by 1.6 crore overall in factories it dropped. Look at businesses, the number of people who are doing business, that dropped by 10 lakh. 10 lakh people who were doing business moved into something else or lost that work. Salary jobs between June to July, 32 lakh less than what it was in June. So just when it was recovering in June and July it's dropped again despite the fact that the third wave is more or less old. The second wave was over in some of the key states where salaried employees actually exist and look at farming. And this is the crucial part. It was 1.6 crore additional jobs, most of them, a large chunk of it was in farming. And that means that these are not really good jobs and the break up there is very clear. The number of people who are casual workers in agriculture who don't own land, who have not gone back to their farm or just looking for some agriculture work is massive. A large number of these 1.1 to crore people are actually just casual workers. They don't have any deep root in agriculture or the village to want to go back there. And that brings me to the last point, this is nothing but distress. This is disguised unemployment. We are going back, our people are going back into the village because they have no work in urban areas. They are going back to agriculture because there is nothing else in agriculture. And let me tell you why agricultural jobs are not good. It is very simple because traditionally we know that the plot sizes are falling. The size of an agriculture plot is falling and it does not need the number of people that are working right now. Agriculture productivity in India is very poor. So if there is a family with three male adults and one woman working, chances are that plot only requires two people. But all four are working right now because they have no other way to go. They have no other work. So when a survey is done, when they are asked what do they do? They say, we do agriculture, we are farmers. All of them say we are farmers, we do agriculture. But in reality only two of them are required. The other two are actually unemployed. That unemployment is disguised. This is distress. This is not something that people want to do. They are going there despite poor and very low wages, despite the fact that agriculture is tough. They are going back there because they have nowhere else to go. Because India's economy is going backward. That is the show today. Keep watching NewsClick.