After the Rashtriya, Janata Dal (RJD) promised one million jobs in the government if the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) that leads is voted into power in Bihar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has tried to overcome it by promising 1.9 million jobs in its electoral manifesto, published on Thursday. The BJP promise will be something of an embarrassment to its alliance partner Janata Dal (United), or JD (U), whose leader and chief minister Nitish Kumar has described the RJD promise as impractical. Despite the political controversies, what explains the mad rush for promising jobs in the Bihar elections? An HT analysis shows that unemployment may be a bigger problem in Bihar than in the rest of India.
Bihar’s unemployment rate is higher than the average for all of India
According to the Periodic Labor Force Survey (PLFS) 2018-19, the official source of employment statistics in India, the unemployment rate in Bihar was 10.2% in India, well above the all-India average of 5 , 8%. A comparison with the previous Employment Unemployment Surveys (EUS), the predecessor of the PLFS, and the PLFS 2017-18 shows that unemployment in Bihar has worsened compared to the rest of India. In 2004-05, Bihar’s unemployment rate was 0.8 times the unemployment rate for the whole of India. This proportion has increased over the years. It was 1.6 in 2011-12, 1.2 in 2017-18, and 1.8 in 2018-19.
Only 10% of jobs in Bihar are salaried jobs
Of course, unemployment rates do not reflect the true pain of the labor market in a country like India. If all managers lost their jobs and started working as farmers or construction workers, the unemployment rate would remain unchanged. Therefore, it is important to consider the quality of the works in addition to the absolute numbers. Bihar fares worse than the average for the whole of India when it comes to the proportion of workers who have a permanent job. According to the 2018-19 PLFS, 23.8% of workers in India had a salaried job. This number was only 10.4% for Bihar. The proportion of workers in salaried employment has increased from 4.2% in 2004-05 EUS, which corresponds to the period when Nitish Kumar took office as prime minister of the state. However, the points are still significantly worse than the situation in all of India.
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Bihar sees the highest emigration for work among the major states
The lack of quality jobs in the state has forced Bihari workers to migrate in search of employment. According to the 2011 census data, Bihar had the highest proportion of migrants who moved for work, employment or business reasons. A 2018 World Bank document by Gaurav Nayyar and Kyoung Yang Kim found that migrant remittances had a 35% share of Bihar’s state gross domestic product (GSDP) and positively affected consumption at the household level. A disproportionate reliance on remittance income must have hurt Bihar more than other states after the national lockdown imposed in March this year, in the wake of the coronavirus disease outbreak. It is natural that discontent with a poor employment scenario in the state has become a big issue at the polls taking place a few months after the shutdown.
Employment is a problem that transcends class and caste lines
Politics in Bihar has long been dominated by caste-based rifts. While the RJD-led alliance may count on the support of Muslims and Yadavs, it is not enough to ensure victory in the state. By championing the cause of employment, the opposition is trying to address an issue that resonates across caste and class boundaries, especially in sectors that have been pro-National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the past. Unemployment rates had risen dramatically among all the major social groups in the state between 2011-12 and 2018-19. The increase was greatest among people who do not belong to either the programmed castes (SC) or the other backward classes (OBC). One in five people who had at least a graduate degree and were part of the workforce, either working or looking for work, was unemployed in Bihar in 2018-19. Unemployment rates, even for those with very little education, were significantly higher in Bihar than the figures for all of India.
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