Radhicka Kapoor on Labor-Intensive Manufacturing in India

Interpreting India · May 11, 2023 · 1h 3m

India’s development has not been uniform and has leapfrogged from agriculture to services, skipping over a manufacturing phase. However, the agriculture and services sectors typically do not create enough productive jobs for those at the bottom of the education and skills ladder. Thus, there is a need for labor-intensive manufacturing to absorb those with low levels of education and skills, but only around 11–12 percent of the total employment is in manufacturing, and this share has been essentially flat for two decades. There is also too much labor employed in the low-productivity…