Mumbai: As per a report released on Tuesday by the Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, almost 50 lakh people lost their employment between 2018 and 2019 after November 8, 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes would not be considered as legal tender.
As per the report, the beginning of the decline in employment rate coincides with the government’s note ban in 2016 but no "causal link" can be built up based on the information, says the report titled ‘State of Working India 2019’.
The employment losses are higher when women are taken under consideration. The women workforce participation has also lowered, the report said.
According to the report, "Whether or not this decline was caused by demonetisation, it is definitely a cause for concern and calls for urgent policy intervention,"
A government report which was leaked in January this year also recorded that the unemployment rate in India rose to a 45-year high in 2017-2018.
The overall unemployment rate was pegged at around 6 per cent in 2017-2018, according to the National Sample Survey Office's (NSSO) Periodic Labour Force Survey, held between 2017 and 2018.
But NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar said the report was "not verified" and the "veracity of the data was not known".
The report said unemployment has largely been driven by higher-educated men in both urban and rural areas, those in the age group of 20 to 24.
"Clearly, there is a large differential impact by level of education. This is consistent with the idea that the informal sector, where we can expect the share of less educated men to be higher, was hit hardest by demonetisation as well as the introduction of GST," the report noted.
