Even in the urban areas, the rate of employment generation has slowed down very dramatically over the various periods considered here, and in the latest period it appears to have been also well below the estimated rate of growth of the urban population. Since it is widely felt that economic growth in the 1990s has been disproportionately higher in the urban areas, the significantly lower rates of employment growth here also suggest very low and falling elasticity of employment generation.
 
Associated with this, there has been a continuation the earlier process of casualisation of labour. Thus for both rural men and women, the share of casual employment has gone up, quite substantially for men.
 
This is probably no surprise, given the lack of more regular employment generation in the countryside following from the more general decline in per capita public spending on the rural areas. This has naturally led to a drying up of regular employment opportunities, and the reduced multiplier effects of this decline also would have had an effect. But it is also not surprising given the lower rate of aggregate employment generation in the countryside, since periods of excess supply in labour markets are typically associated with worse conditions for the workers, in terms of less secure or regular contracts at the very least.
 
For urban workers, the pattern is much more mixed. For men, there is only a very slight increase in casual contracts. For women workers, in fact there is a substantial increase in regular work, although this increase is greater when all workers (principal and subsidiary status) are taken together, rather than for principal status alone. This suggests that at least some of the increase may be a reflection of regular but secondary work undertaken by women to supplement household income, for example through manufacturing activities on a putting out basis at home, or part time service activities.
 
Such a dramatic deceleration in employment growth, well below the estimated rates of population growth, would normally be associated with very significant increases in unemployment. This would happen to a more limited extent than otherwise, since it is usually typical of poor countries with low to non-existent social security benefits, that the working population cannot afford the luxury of open unemployment.
 
However, the data show that usual status unemployment has increased only marginally for rural men and women, and has actually decreased for urban men and women workers. This points to a substantial decline in labour participation rates overall.
 
The main reason for this is the expansion of education, which seems to be drawing in more and more of the population in the age group 10-19 years. This is of course a very welcome and positive development. In fact, the NSS suggests that in the sample year, as many as 78.5 per cent of rural boys and 64.3 per cent of rural girls (of the age group 10-14 years) were "usually" occupied in school. For urban areas the figures are as high as 87.5 per cent for boys and 82.5 per cent for girls. If these numbers are even approximately correct then it is a sign of much hope.
 
This also means that the process of education has absorbed some of the slack in the labour market so that unemployment rates are not as high as they would otherwise have been given the very slow and falling rate of employment growth. But it does not get away from the basic problem, that the system is simply not generating enough job opportunities for the aggregate labour force.
 
Clearly, there is something very wrong with an economic growth process that not only does not increase the rate of employment generation, but actually brings it to a historic low. Even in the context of a poor history of employment generation, the latter part of the past decade ranks as the worst ever performance.
 
It turns out. therefore, that the expectations of neoliberal marketist reformers have certainly been belied even in the area of employment. Obviously, the production restructuring that has occurred in the Indian economy has not been of a type which has created more labour-intensive productive activities. Nor has there been sufficient dynamism to make the overall employment grow faster because of sheer volume increases in output.
 
In fact, quite the opposite tendency appears to be at work. The NSS evidence on employment generation - or rather, the lack of it - suggests that the basic economic problems of unemployment and low productivity unemployment not only remain unresolved, but have actually grown more acute, after a decade of marketist reforms. It is more crucial than ever, then, to think of different economic strategies that would focus on productive employment expansion.