India jobless rate shoots up to 8%
6 hours ago Picture used for illustrative purpose.
As the severe second wave of Covid-19 and the resultant lockdowns bring economic activities to a halt, India’s job scenario worsened in April 2021.
As per data published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), India’s unemployment rate rose 8 per cent in April, against 6.5 per cent in March.
“April 2021 turned out to be worse than expectations. We had expected labour participation rate to stabilise at its March 2021 level. The LPR had dropped sharply in March already after a modest fall in February. But, the LPR fell for a third consecutive month in April,” CMIE’s CEO Mahesh Vyas said.
Lockdowns 2.0: Lives win over livelihoods
Lockdowns 2.0: Lives win over livelihoods
Second wave Covid restrictions may already have wiped out the gains the job market saw at the end of last year
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UPDATED: May 14, 2021 01:27 IST
Though the Centre has resisted announcing a national lockdown to halt the second wave of Covid-19 cases sweeping through India, many state governments have implemented variously calibrated curbs to deal with the spread of the virus. With 98 per cent of the population now under some form of lockdown, the impact on jobs is visible. Research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) says India lost 3.4 million salaried jobs in April this year, when Covid-19 tallies were growing exponentially.
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At the beginning of 2021, when S&P Global Ratings forecast Indian gross domestic product growth at 11% for the coming financial year, the number looked eminently achievable. Last month, the Goods and Services Tax a good barometer of economy activity hit 1.41 trillion rupees ($19.1 billion), its highest ever monthly collection. Indeed, it’s been higher than the benchmark Rs. 1 trillion for seven consecutive months and higher than the same month for the last year for eight consecutive months.
India’s international merchandise trade reached $34 billion in March, the highest ever, and stayed over $30 billion in April. Many short term economic indicators auto sales, electricity consumption, highway toll collection were also pointing to a strong recovery after a crushing 2020.
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The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic which struck India between the end of February and beginning of March continues unabated. The alarming rate at which it has spiraled out of control especially in the last four weeks has left citizens helpless, and also exposed the under-preparedness of authorities to deal with this unprecedented health crisis. While daily COVID-19 cases started to rise steadily since end of February, it was in the first week of April that India surpassed the first wave peak of 97,654 daily cases (on September 16 last year). Since then, the country has witnessed a huge surge in daily cases with the country hitting grim milestones each day (consistently over 300,000 cases since April 20). The country now accounts for almost half of daily COVID-19 cases and almost 30 percent of daily deaths due to the disease globally. Many experts believe that the actual numbers of cases and fatalities are much higher than those being reported.
Poor people, without a support system, were the worst sufferers of the partial and complete lockdown, the survey released by Azim Premji University suggests