Job crisis & note ban: How Bengal is losing its demographic opportunity

The jobs crisis is one of India's leading election issues as the country heads into general elections during the summer of 2019.

The son of farmers for whom farming was no longer viable, Tapan Das left home 20 years ago. Today he is 42, illiterate, earns about Rs 4,000 a month working on construction sites--Rs 3,000 if you deduct the rent he pays for a mud house without electricity and water in an illegal slum.

Sometimes, his wife and he survive on fena bhaat, a watery, boiled rice. His two children get a more nutritious lunch at the local government-run anganwadi or creche here in India’s 7th most populous city. “I and my wife, somehow we manage,” said Das, as he anxiously scanned platform number two at Dhakuria railway station in southern Kolkata, waiting for a labour contractor to offer him a job for the day.

Tapan Das and his wife sometimes survive on watery, boiled rice. When farming failed, the illiterate son of a farmer left home 20 years ago. Today, he earns Rs 4,000 a month as a casual labourer.

There are about 15,000 others like Das on Dhakuria’s packed platform two, mostly men of “working age”--as demographers call them--aged between 20 and 59, and some women older than that. Their common desperation for any kind of work not only represents the drop in opportunities after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation in November 2016. It also lays bare the closing of an opportunity for West Bengal and five other states to cash in on India’s demographic dividend, the economic growth that accrues from a large working-age population.

India’s demographic opportunity stretches longer than any other country, from 2005-06 to 2055-56, but falling fertility rates mean the window of opportunity for two states (Kerala and Tamil Nadu) is closed. For West Bengal, Delhi, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Punjab, it is “closing now”--2021 being the outer date--according to a 2018 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report.

The jobs crisis is one of India’s leading election issues as the country heads into general elections during the summer of 2019, as IndiaSpend reported on March 26, 2019.

Although West Bengal created most jobs among Indian states over seven years to 2012, according to a 2018 World Bank report, this was not enough to provide livelihoods for millions of unskilled or semi-skilled workers pouring out of the state’s rural areas and from the poorer neighbouring states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa.

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