A group of industry veterans on Monday launched a national initiative called ‘Hundred Million Jobs’, which aims to create 10 crore employment opportunities in India over the next decade. This initiative has been launched at a time when the country is facing the challenge of inadequate employment generation despite rapid economic growth.
According to the organizers, the campaign was announced by Harish Mehta, co-founder of software industry body NASSCOM, AJ Patel, founder of global entrepreneur network ‘The Indus Entrepreneurs’ (TIE) and K Yatish Rajawat, founder of the Center for Innovation in Public Policy (CIPP).
The founders said that the working age population in India is growing at the rate of about 1.2 crore every year, while traditional employment sectors like manufacturing are not expanding at the expected pace. To take full advantage of the country’s demographic dividend, it is necessary to create 80 to 90 lakh new jobs every year. Although India is among the world’s fastest growing major economies, the pace of employment growth has lagged behind output expansion.
The increasing use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has put pressure on entry-level jobs in many sectors, deepening concerns that the gap between economic growth and job creation could widen.
The ‘Hundred Million Jobs’ Mission places entrepreneurship, skill development and labour-intensive enterprises at the center of India’s employment strategy. The initiative aims to make employment generation a key parameter of economic growth, to ensure decentralized, sustainable and dignified livelihoods across sectors. Harish Mehta said that this initiative is a concerted effort to empower entrepreneurs, micro, small and medium enterprises and employers to create resilient and dignified livelihoods for the next generation through better synergy between skills, enterprise, data and policy.
At the same time, AJ Patel said that startups and small industries, which contribute about 30 percent to India’s GDP and are the largest employers, should also expand outside the metros. He stressed that if the country has to create 80-90 lakh jobs every year, the structural barriers that make entrepreneurship viable for the common people will have to be removed.
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