India Lost Close To 1.5 Million Jobs Post Demonetisation: Survey
The entire country was in fix, when on 9th of November, citizens across India were informed that the 500 and 1000 INR currency notes in their pockets will no longer serve them as a legal tender. The next few days that followed held sight of long queues outside ATM’s.
The prime minister declared that this was indeed a brave move to tackle black money in India and promised the citizens that the pain would last a few days. The citizens were full of hope; people cooperated and stood outside banks for hours and hours. Even people in villages, travelled miles to find a functioning ATM. Many a times after hours of waiting, when their turn would come, the ATM’s would run out of money.
Resilience prevailed. Political parties join hands and agitated at this move. The entire economy faced a massive cash crunch, still Indian citizens showed faith in their elected government hoping that demonetization would feed results, as promised by the elected government. Days passed with no sign of improvement. Even the Modi government agreed that the entire roll out of this massive operation of demonetization could have been worked out better.
After math of demonetization:
The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a think-tank that tracks economic data, states that about 1.5 million jobs were lost in January-April 2017, a likely result of demonetization.
The estimated total employment during the period (Jan-April 2017) was 405 million compared to 406.5 million during the preceding four months, September-December 2016…This is the total employment in the country, including organised and unorganised sectors, agricultural and non-agricultural sectors”, declared Mahesh Vyas, managing director & CEO of CMIE, in his report.
This is believed to be an after-effect of demonetization. “In November 2016, it was still the festive season but, the labour participation rate fell to a new low of 44.8%. It is therefore, apparent that this was an immediate impact of demonetization,” added Vyas. These estimates are based on a survey having a sample size of 161,167 households that included 519,285 adults.
Another survey by the All India Manufacturers Organisation (AIMO) which represents over 300,000 small, medium and large scale industries, had projected a 60% drop in employment and a 55% loss in revenue before March 2017. Also, India’s GDP grew at 7.1% in 2016-17 as compared to 8% in the previous financial year which indicates how the overall economy has struggled too.
