Economic Survey Pitches Chinese Formula for Job Creation, Introduces ‘Assemble for World in India’

New Delhi: In order to tackle joblessness in India, Economic Survey tabled in the Parliament on Friday proposed the labour-intensive Chinese model of production.

Chief Economic Advisor of India, Krishnamurthy Subramanian, also highlighted India’s comparative advantage in labour-intensive activities, traditional unskilled labour-intensive industries such as textiles, footwear, toys and assembly hubs. He suggested that these industries must be focused on.

Introducing a new campaign “Assemble in India for the world”, the Survey said that integrating it into Make in India can create 4 crore well-paid jobs by 2025 and 8 crore by 2030. The survey stated that the general education improves knowledge of the people while skill training enhances their employability and equips them to tackle requirements of the labour market.

India has huge potential to emerge as a major hub for final assembly in a range of products, referred to as "network products" (NP), the survey said.

The experience of countries that have achieved rapid and sustained export growth, according to the Economic Survey, suggests that India can reap rich dividends by adopting policies aimed at strengthening its involvement in the export market for NP.

Citing example of China, the survey said that "Labour abundant countries, like China, specialize in low skilled labour-intensive stages of production such as assembly while the richer countries specialise in capital and skill-intensive stages such as R&D".

"Thus, the lead firms retain skill and knowledge-intensive stages of production in high-income headquarters but locate assembly related activities in low wage countries," it added.

Highlighting the development in the female workforce, the survey said there is an 8 per cent increase in regular employment of women in 2017-18 over 2011-12. Further, to enhance the employability of female workers, the government is providing training to them through a network of women Industrial Training Institutes, National Vocational Training Institutes and Regional Vocational Training Institutes, the economic survey added.