To some extent, this pattern is mirrored in what is happening to organised sector employment. The deceleration and even decline in organised sector employment is one of the more disconcerting features of the 1990s, especially given that industrial output has increased manifold and the service sector in which much of the organised employment is based has been the most dynamic element in national income growth.
 
Despite this, not only has organised sector employment expansion slowed down considerably compared to the earlier decade, it has actually fallen in absolute terms for male workers. Chart 9 describes the pattern of male organised employment across public and private sectors. It is evident that the fall is due to the collapse in public sector employment, a denouement which has been greatly welcomed by economic liberalisers who see in this tendency a reduction of the large-scale overmanning still present in government and the public sector generally.
Chart 9 >>
 
While public sector employment has fallen especially in the latter part of the period under consideration, private organised sector employment has continued to increase, albeit slowly. But this increase has simply not been enough to compensate for the decline in public employment, so that total male organised sectors employment has fallen slightly over the decade, as shown in Chart 11. Since organised sector work is still the most desired form of employment for male workers, this is an unfortunate tendency which adds to the other variables suggesting that overall employment conditions facing Indian men have worsened over the decade.
Chart 10 >> Chart 11 >>
 
For women workers, by contrast, there has been a slight increase in aggregate organised sector employment evident in Chart 11. Chart 10 indicates that this has been due to increases in both public and private employment, although the increase is slightly sharper for private organised employment. Nevertheless, while such employment has increased, the numbers are nowhere near large enough in relation to the sizeable increase in terms of absolute numbers of female labour force over the same period. Also, this increase is still not enough to prevent a substantial deceleration in aggregate organised sector employment over the 1990s.
 
What all this suggests is that the pattern of growth over the 1990s has not been one which has generated sufficient employment even in the urban areas. This belies the expectations of those who had pushed for the economic strategy of the 1990s, that deregulation and trade liberalisation would be adequate incentives to more employment-intensive economic activity.
 
There are several reasons for this outcome, which is in because of rather than in spite of, the types of economic policies that have been pursued. Thus, these policies have systematically worked against the interests of most small producers, who account for not only e most labour-intensive forms of urban production but also the dominant part of urban manufacturing employment. Thus, the reduction of priority sector credit allocation, the shift in emphasis in terms of financing investment from banks to the stock market (where most small players simply cannot enter) the removal of various export subsidies from which small-scale exporters benefited, have all militated against the interests and viability of such enterprises.
 
Meanwhile, public investment in vital urban infrastructure has declined considerably, and public "cost-cutting" and other practices have also reduced the efficiency and accessibility of the infrastructure that currently exists because of inadequate maintenance. These not only create important bottlenecks for all producers, they also add to costs in general.
 
On top of all this, there is the pressure coming from newly freed imports becoming available at ever lower average rates of tariff. Such import competition is particularly difficult for small scale producers to meet, not only because of the greater control of many large companies over distributive networks, but also because they are unable to match the huge advertising budgets of larger companies and multinationals in particular. The role played by such import competition in reducing the viability of small enterprises and therefore in exerting downward pressure on urban employment in particular, should not be underestimated.
 
Meanwhile, as exporters strive to become or remain competitive in an increasingly difficult international environment, they are forced not only to find various ways of making labour more "flexible" than ever (through lower wages and more insecure working conditions), but also to adopt relatively capital-intensive new technologies that can ensure the quality and consistency that are required in world markets. This means that employment elasticities of production in such sectors tend to decline consistently, and so they also cannot be looked upon as large sources of potential employment generation.
 
If these patterns are to be halted or reversed, then the entire economic strategy obviously needs to be reworked. This is likely to become a more pressing concern as the social and political tensions that are released by such open or disguised unemployment become more obvious. As these exacerbate, it will no longer be enough for the rulers of the day to blame it all on technology and population, and they may be forced to consider alternative paths of industrialisation and development that actually put productive employment generation and poverty reduction at the forefront of the aims of public policy.