Radhicka Kapoor on Labor-Intensive Manufacturing in India

<p>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 unorganized sector, and there are too few jobs in the high-productivity formal sector. As recently as 2015–16, the unorganized sector continued to employ over 70 percent of total manufacturing employment. Inclusive growth would require us to find ways to enable formal manufacturing to prosper.</p><p>In this episode of Interpreting India, <a href="https://www.theigc.org/people/radhicka-kapoor"><strong>Radhicka Kapoor</strong></a> joins <a href="https://carnegieindia.org/experts/2265" target="_blank"><strong>Sayoudh Roy</strong></a> to discuss the state of labor-intensive manufacturing in India.</p><p>--</p><p><strong>Episode Contributors</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.theigc.org/people/radhicka-kapoor"><strong>Radhicka Kapoor</strong></a> is a visiting professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, in addition to having previously worked at the Planning Commission and at the International Labour Organization, Geneva. Her research interests include poverty and inequality, labor economics and industrial performance, and she has published extensively on labor-intensive manufacturing in India. Most recently, she has edited <a href="https://www.amazon.in/REFORM-PARADIGM-Festschrift-Honour-Ahluwalia-ebook/dp/B0BJDMV8N5"><i>A New Reform Paradigm</i></a>, a collection of essays written in honor of Isher Judge Ahluwalia.</p><p><a href="https://carnegieindia.org/experts/2265">Sayoudh Roy</a> is a senior