Emphasis Of Five Year Plans For Employment Generation

Emphasis Of Five Year Plans For Employment Generation

Though the removal of unemployment has been a proclaimed objective of India’s economic planning, & yet until the Sixth Five Year Plan one does not find any reference to long-term employment policy to tackle the unemployment problem. For a long time, it was assumed that the employment situation would automatically improve as a result of economic growth. Direct measures to eliminate unemployment are not preferred as the apprehension was that they could slow down the growth process.

  1. For two decades reliance was placed on the cottage and agro-based industries and infrastructural projects for absorbing the backlog of unemployed and the additional labour force joining the labour market in search of jobs. This policy was obviously inadequate to tackle the unemployment problem and as a result, the number of unemployed rose to about 22 million in 1969.
  2. The employment policy envisaged in the Fourth Five Year Plan was greatly influenced by the Report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on the World Employment Programme published in the late sixties.
  3. The Fourth Plan accepted the need for pursuing comprehensive programmes of rural development, labour-intensive public works programmes, application of labour-intensive technology in industries and promotion of labour-intensive industrial products for domestic and foreign markets.
  4. Under the Fifth Five Year Plan a high priority was accorded to the removal of unemployment. This conformed with the objective of redistributive growth, a major objective of the Fifth Plan. The Fifth Plan also identified some special schemes of rural development having large employment potential.
  5. The employment policy under the Sixth Plan aimed at “the two major goals of reducing underemployment for the majority of the labour force and cutting down on long-term unemployment The government decided to concentrate particularly on policy measures seeking to influence the private demand and utilisation of manpower in the private and allied activities as well as non-farm operations. T
  6. The Seventh Plan like some other earlier plans assigned a key role to the agricultural sector for employment generation. Under the Seventh Plan, there was also a considerable emphasis on the creation of conditions for additional self-employment. Therefore, apart from sectoral programmes, the package of poverty alleviation programmes aimed at giving self-employment and wage 1 employment to the poorer sections of the community were continued on a big scale.
  7. Under the Eighth Plan, there was an emphasis on both the growth of the economy and restructuring of output composition of growth. The plan set a target of 2.6-2.8 per cent annual growth in employment to achieve a near full employment situation in a period of 10 years. It advocated readjusting the sectoral composition of output, special and subsectoral diversification of agriculture, wasteland development etc., and improving employment opportunities in the rural non-farm sector, promoting small and decentralized industrial sector, and faster growth of informal and service sectors. It also advocated changes in labour market policies.
  8. The Ninth plan emphasized the need for providing productive work as it is a basic source of human dignity and self-respect. It also acknowledged the fact that in a ‘labour – surplus economy’, like India market forces alone cannot be relied upon to provide gainful work to all.
  9. The backlog of unemployment at the stock of the Tenth plan was estimated at 35 million.  Roughly 50 million person-years of employment was planned to be generated over the Tenth plan period so that the backlog of unemployment would be brought down to roughly 21 million at the end of the Tenth Plan.
  10. Under the Eleventh Five year plan aims at creating 58 million job opportunities. The Plan advocates an employment strategy that can ensure the rapid growth of employment and improvement in the quality of employment. The Twelfth Five Year Plan hopes to make the manufacturing sector a genuine engine of growth, which could generate 100 million work opportunities by 2022.
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