Private security industry bigger employer than healthcare: Study

TWO OF EVERY THREE INDIAN WORKERS EARNED UP TO ₹10,000 PER MONTH IN 2015

NEW DELHI: The private security industry in India employed 7 million workers in 2015, making it larger than healthcare and almost as large as public administration. Two of every three Indian workers earned up to ₹10,000 per month in 2015, much less than the stipulated minimum wage of ₹18,000 prescribed by the seventh pay commission set up by central government.

Most Indian manufacturing companies are sub-scale, with just 26 of every 10,000 manufacturing companies having more than 5,000 workers the same year. The importance of the Indian IT sector is that while the share of IT companies in India’s total employment is less than 1%, the business has the greatest share of firms (4%), reporting more than 5,000 employees in the year 2016.

These are the findings of The State of Working India 2018, released on Tuesday by the Centre for Sustainable Employment based at Azim Premji University.

Job numbers are not the only divisive issue when it comes to an analysis of India’s labour markets. One school of thought makes a virtue out of the Indian economy’s advances in knowledge-based sectors such as Information Technology and Business Processing Management (IT-BPM). Another counters this claim by citing millions of unorganised sector workers employed in poorly paid and insecure jobs.

Employers in skill-intensive sectors complain about education not adding to employability. At the same time, the share of young men and women who are postponing their entry into the wage market to seek higher education has been increasing. But what has happened to the lot of workers? Has it improved? Or hasn’t it? Neither headlines about millionaires being created by the newest unicorn, nor those about workers dying from lack of basic safety equipment captures this reality. Put simply, have things changed for good or bad, when India’s economic growth has been quite high? The answer, from the survey, is that the average Indian worker is not worse off than he/ she was earlier, but that the improvement is too piecemeal to be celebrated.

This is the story on all fronts: wage growth, quality of jobs, even caste and gender-based discrimination. Wages have risen, the share of regular employment has gone up, caste and gender-based inequality in wages has been coming down — but the progress is too slow. There are significant divergences from the all-India headline numbers across regions and sectors.