Sunday, March 30, 2014

Indian manufacturing stagnates due to peculiar labour laws

India’s manufacturing sector has stagnated because “The very peculiar structural” labour law in our country is rigid and it need to be made flexible, India-born British economist Meghnad Desai.
“India’s manufacturing sector has stagnated because of the very peculiar structural labour laws. Flexible labour laws will help the growth of both organized and unorganized sector,” Desai said at the event on March 21.
India’s growth failure is mainly due to its failure in increasing manufacturing growth, Desai said.
According to the Planning Commission data the manufacturing sector has stagnated at 16 percent of the GDP with only 1.8 percent of India’s share in global manufacturing.
This is in strong contrast to the other Asian nations experience at similar stages of economic development, particularly china with 34 percent of GDP constituted by the manufacturing sector and 13.7 percent of the world manufacturing.
Desai further stressed upon the rural population work force utilization to increase the nation’s productivity. “Productivity gap between agriculture and services is 1:9. The only way to improve it is by increasing the labour for productivity. It is estimated that 60 percent of our population is in rural areas. At least half of the rural population must be moved out of the rural areas,” he said.
Labour reforms have been pending in India for a long time and several amendments to various laws have been waiting for the Parliamentary approval.
India has number of labour laws dealing with trade unions, provident funds, industrial disputes and establishment for increasing the labour force productivity but the country’s economic growth rate has fallen to 4.5 percent in 2012-13.

As per Central Statistical Organisation it is estimated that the economy is likely to grow by 4.9 percent in the current fiscal, ending March 31.
                                                                                                                    Reference: The Economic Times

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