In this Forbes India article, IDFC Institute Advisory Board member Manish Sabharwal writes: "anybody who is unemployed or unskilled does not have choices and, therefore, freedom."
He says:
"[India has] have 300 million people who will never read the newspaper they deliver, sit in the car they clean, drive the tractor they unload, or send their kids to the school they helped build. I’d like to make the case that there is a difference between independence and freedom; independence was about getting rid of the British but freedom is about individual choices. And anybody who is unemployed or unskilled does not have choices and, therefore, freedom...
... the solution to poverty is job creation, entrepreneurship and skills; we made a mistake in 1991 by defining reforms as purely financial and should have fixed our factor markets (land, labour and capital)... most of our enterprises are dwarfs (small enterprises that will stay small) rather than babies (small enterprises that will grow big): Eighty percent of manufacturing is done in enterprises with less than 50 employees)...
The problem often lies in India’s factor markets of land, labour and capital. The land question has got tangled with the radioactive issue of acquisition but the primary problem is urbanisation. The massive divergence between real and nominal wages in our job hubs (cities with more than a million people) is murdering migration at the bottom of the pyramid. India only has 45 cities with more than a million people; China has 375...
...The final variable is labour; 100 percent of net jobs in the last 25 years have been created informally; surely there is nothing genetic about Indians and informality so labour law reform is important for the demand side.
... the broader theme needs to be decentralisation; the use of Section 254 (2) of the Constitution that allows states to amend central laws is an innovation because 29 chief ministers matter more than one prime minister for entrepreneurship. But two specific ease-of-doing business interventions could make a huge impact: One, a single Aadhaar number for enterprises to replace the 17 currently used across all state and central governments. Two, online and deadline: That is, a single electronic interface with a deadline for all government registrations and permissions....
... Over the next two decades, ten lakh kids will join the labour force every month; all these kids need jobs and skills...."
