India's big problem is wages, says Manish Sabharwal

Hyderabad: Even as elections are fought on a slump in the job creation, a top official of Indian recruitment firm TeamLease said on Thursday that India does not have a shortage of jobs. He, however, argued that the country faces a problem with respect to wages.

“Indian youth do not have a job problem. In fact they face a wage problem. They are not getting jobs which pay them their desired salary,” said TeamLease chairman Manish Sabharwal during the concluding session of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

The job creation — or lack of it — has been in the limelight in India after a labour ministry report suggested a slower pace of job creation as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised to create one crore jobs in five years if his party won 2014 Lok Sabha elections. With robotics and automation replacing human labour at several stages, the government tried to focus on encouraging startups to create jobs.

Mr Sabharwal, however, feels that pushing self-employment as an alternative to jobs is fraught with difficulties as every person cannot be an entrepreneur and every entrepreneur cannot succeed in his venture.

In order to address this issue, he said, the government must focus on four things — formalisation of economy, industrialisation, urbanisation and improving the human capital.