Dr Yoshifumi Usami, Research Fellow, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Tokyo, presented his study on the “Dynamics of Change in the Structure of Employment in India,” at the office of the Foundation on July 26, 2018.

The study is based on the survey data obtained from the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), Government of India.

Dr Usami highlighted that the decline in the agricultural workforce in the last two decades is essentially due to the fact that a large part of ‘female self-employed’ workers have in recent times left agriculture to become, what NSSO regards as, non-workers. These female workers are mostly engaged with activities like livestock maintenance. The NSSO definition of work excludes subsidiary activities from its purview. Due to this limitation, highlighted the economist, around 50-60 per cent of the female workforce was missing from the NSSO data.

In the next part of the presentation, Dr Usami explained the method of age-cohort analysis to study the changes in rural employment structure in further detail. He discussed the problem of “Age Heaping at multiples of 5 and 10”, which, he feels, renders it difficult to apply this method to the age groups above 29.

Dr Usami concluded that among the rural youth, workers with up-to higher secondary education tend to move to agriculture, while those with technical diplomas got into manufacturing sector. The ones with college degrees are either self employed in agriculture or employed in the service sector.