Union Budget 2024: How It Targets The Problem Of Unemployment And Skill Gaps In India?
As per the statistics, 68% of the Indian population lies between 15-59 years of age and the current Worker Population Ratio (WPR) (above 15 years of age) is 56%. As per the Economic Survey’s estimate, India’s workforce is estimated to be nearly 56.5 crore and early 33.8% of the people from 15-59 are unemployed and outside the workforce.
India has a large and young population, with 66% of its total population under the age of 35 as of August 2023 and this is expected to go even further for another 40 years. Only 51.25% of the youth are deemed employable. This means about 1 in 2 graduates are not readily employable. However, the situation has improved from 34% to 51.3% in the last decade. Currently, the major focus is to provide employment and required skills to the youth.
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Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Modi 3.0 budget today in the Parliament. This budget is significant, especially for the youth who are joining the workforce at a large scale with two perspectives; one for providing employment opportunities to the youth and secondly, to align their skills according to the market requirement.
Union Budget 2024: Measures To Enhance Employment And Employability
- The Indian Economic Survey 2024-24 pointed out the need to generate an average of nearly 78.5 lakh jobs annually until 2030 in the non-farm sector to address the employment issue of the rising workforce.
- As per the Finance Minister, the focus of the budget 2024 is on 4 major areas namely Poor, Women, Youth, and Farmers.
- Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamn announced that the government will launch a comprehensive scheme by providing internships for the upskilling of 1 crore youth in 12 months in the top 500 companies.
- In India, MSMEs employ more than 110 million in rural and urban areas, so the government committed to facilitating the continuation of credit to Micro, Small, and Medium enterprises. The MSME sector faces issues such as limited access to credit currently.
- 5 schemes were initiated to facilitate employment including skilling for 4.1 crore youth with an allocation of 2 lakh crore.
- An allocation of 1.48 lakh crore has been allocated to the education, employment, and skilling sectors.
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- The focus will be to train 20 lakh young people over 5 years through a new centrally funded scheme with the cooperation of states.
- 1,000 ITIs will be updated according to the industry skill requirements.
- Skilling loans under model skill loan schemes for up to 7 lakh rupees will benefit nearly 25,000 students each year.
- Artificial Intelligence tends to disrupt the workforce if not skilled properly and the AI-related research is also not according to the need. So, 3 centers of excellence for Artificial Intelligence are also going to be established in premier educational institutions.
