Hindustan Times ST (Jaipur)

Pvt security industry bigger employer than healthcare: Study

- Roshan Kishore letters@hindustant­imes.com

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 the 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 the 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 knowledgeb­ased 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.

NEW DELHI:

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