‘Make in India’ Campaign: Labour Law Reform Strategy and Its Impact on Job Creation Opportunities in India

Abstract

The need of employment generation has never been more pressing than now when youth is occupying larger share in the pie of demographic profile of the country. There are several employment challenges such as adequate skill requirement and large-scale employment generation, flexibility of employer to cope up with turbulent global manufacturing environment and social security programme to cater to the need of employees. Development of manufacturing sector is always at the centre irrespective of NDA (National Democratic Alliance) led government or UPA (United Progressive Alliance) led government. To create jobs for the manufacturing sector is always a challenging task. This article throws some light on the manufacturing employment scenario in the pre-reform and post-reform era. This article also tries to explore the impact of recent proposed labour law reforms on the job creation opportunities. It follows exploratory—secondary data—research design. The scope of this research is limited to two major laws, namely, Factories Act, 1948 and Apprenticeship Act, 1961, and other law reforms in the country. With the support of the recent 26th Quarterly Employment Survey by labour ministry and the analysis of the labour law reforms, this article leads to the conclusion that these reforms have not had any significant impact on the job creation opportunities.