Speaking at the Public Affairs Forum of India’s PAFI’s 10th Annual Forum 2023 in New Delhi on Thursday, he said that India can benefit from the largest importers in the western world. “America, the UK, etc are shifting away from China. Therefore, a huge opportunity for us. I was mentioning earlier about labour-intensive exports. China has 30-50% global market share in almost every labour-intensive export, India is about 2%. So there’s a golden opportunity when the focus is not on China,” he said.
The way to structurally transform 80% of India’s population is by creating jobs, and by getting people out of agriculture into manufacturing and services, said Dhawan. “China lifted 800-900 million people out of poverty by doing the same. Creating jobs in services and manufacturing is ultimately the marker of success and development.”
At the same time, the country also needs to look at innovation and skills, which needs to start with education. He pointed out that the World Bank’s index for learning poverty shows 55% of children in India are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and maths. “So this bottom half will be behind forever. But concerted efforts for grades 1-3 can go a long way to help them. Even countries like Vietnam, which is a competitor, has this index of 15%,” he said.
Skilling is also important to prepare the labour force of tomorrow. On top of this, labour in India faces a problem from the demand side as more jobs are needed, and the participation of women in the labour force is low.
“Even though many social norms have changed, the female labour force participation remains low and may have even declined for a period of time. Therefore, a policy framework needs to be on how to make more investments? How do we create more jobs, how do we get credit to flow, etc,” he added.
