For age-group of 15–29 years in Odisha, the joblessness cauldron continues to boil because for every 100 person joining the labour force, a high of 15 could find no jobs to work in State.
The worrying sign is total unemployed in age-group of 15 – 29 years in State for the period ending August in year 2018 stood menacingly high at a whopping 4.94lakh. But overall, the counts of unemployed in Odisha in age-group of 15 years or above stood high at around 9.8lakh.
Such a critical scenario in unemployment in Odisha was recently brought to fore by country’s leading private economic think-thank, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) along with BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange).
The CMIE estimated unemployment rate in State based on direct interviews of job seekers collected under CMIE’s Consumer Pyramid Survey covering over 1.61lakh households with around 5.8lakh members of over 15-yrs age across the States, which CMIE claimed as the largest ever sample size to collect employment – unemployment data in the country and that too, with the best technical accuracy.
Though the CMIE-BSE unemployment tracker estimated overall unemployment rate in Odisha during May – August at 6.6 per cent from 6.7 per cent in January to April 2018, the shocker is unemployment rate in the age-group of 15-29 years in Odisha stood onerously higher at a whopping 15 per cent. Significantly, Odisha figured 9th among the top-10 major States in country having overall high unemployment rate during January- August 2018.
According to CMIE – BSE tracker, unemployment rate (UR) among graduates or above in Odisha stood higher at 14.4 per cent vis-Ã -vis of 12 per cent nationally. Moreover, the acuteness in unemployment in Odisha stood starkly highlighted when the tracker finds a whopping 18.5 per cent unemployment rate in Odisha among jobseekers with no education vis-a-vis mere 1.27 per cent nationally. This crucial fact hints at the abnormally higher migration rate of unskilled labourers from Odisha to other States.
The unemployment rate when analysed on basis of maximum education level attained by job seekers in Odisha, the disturbing fact that is found is higher the education level, worse is the unemployment rate in the
State. The CMIE – BSE reveals that unemployment rate in category of ‘graduate or and above’ is at over 14 per cent, whereas unemployment rate is 8.6 per cent in the category of education level of ‘10th – 12th standard’.
Moreover, the total unemployed in the age-group of 15 – 29 years in Odisha was estimated at around 4.9lakh, when the labour force in the age-group was at around 32.6lakh. This despite the fact that labour force population in categories like ’10 – 12th and graduate or above’ in State is mere 45lakh in comparison to the total labour force population of over 1.4crore in State.
Moreover, the big shocker for Odisha is female unemployment in age-group of 20-24years and 25-29 years stood astronomically higher at 31 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively. While unemployment rate for females in urban was 12.5 per cent, it’s 21 per cent in rural Odisha.