Wadhwani Foundation's 'Job Creation Summit' held in New Delhi

The panel included Manohar Parrikar, Defence Minister, and Romesh Wadhwani, Founder & Chairman, Wadhwani Foundation.

Between 2005 and 2012, India’s GDP growth was 54% but its job growth was only 3% at 15 million net new jobs. 

The GDP-Jobs growth disconnect will get much worse in the next 10 years. At an annual growth rate of 7-8% the GDP will roughly double in the next 10 years.

Meanwhile, the number of workers entering the workforce will increase to 8 million each year i.e. 80 million net new job-seekers by 2025.

At the current job creation rate of 3 million jobsper year, only about 30 million new jobs will get created over the period.

This implies a job creation gap of about 50 million jobs in the next 10 years, with at least 30-35 million of these in manufacturing and services.  With the rising expectations of the workforce, and India’s need for more skilled labor, most of these jobs will have to be Quality Jobs.

In order to keep track of GDP and job growth, Romesh Wadhwani, Founder & Chairman, Wadhwani Foundation suggested to “appoint a National Jobs Advisor to the Prime Minister in the PMO. The Advisor would align job growth planning with economic planning; ensure integration of the multiple but siloed job-related policies across central ministries, as well as with the States; enable sharing of best practices between States, and provide a liaison between GOI and the private sector. Most importantly, the Advisor would monitor actual outcomes for quick mid-course policy corrections as needed”.

Manohar Parrikar, Hon’ble Minister of Defence stressed on the importance of streamlining the ‘Ease of doing business’ in India.

He added, “The government should get away from the lengthy process of filing the documents for the startups and it is working with all the ministries for deregulation for startups. This will further help ease of doing business in India. Startups should be exempted from all the formalities in the initial first 5 years for their growth”.

Romesh Wadhwani further added, “Much needs to be done to improve the ease of doing business in India, especially for SMEs. It takes too long to start a business, operate a business or close a business, due to multiple formalities involved. Archaic size restrictions continue to pigeon-hole enterprises into unviable, ineffective and inflexible categories. A well-crafted Startup Policy, free from errors of the past, should be able to effectively unlock the situation.