By Aman Kayal, Academic Content Writer of Economics
There has been a change in the structure of the workforce in India. Newly emerging jobs are found mostly in the service sector. The expansion of the service sector and the advent of high technology now frequently permit a highly competitive existence for efficient small scale and often individual enterprises or specialist workers side by side with the multinationals. Outsourcing of work is becoming a common practice. It means that a big firm finds it profitable to close down some of its specialist departments (for example, legal or computer programming or customer service sections) and hand over a large number of small piecemeal jobs to very small enterprises or specialist individuals, sometimes situated even in other countries. The traditional notion of the modern factory or office, as a result, has been altered in such a manner that for many the home is becoming the workplace. All of this change has not gone in favour of the individual worker. The nature of employment has become more informal with only limited availability of social security measures to the workers. In the last few decades, there has been rapid growth in the gross domestic product, but without simultaneous increase in employment opportunities. This has forced the government to take up initiatives in generating employment opportunities particularly in the rural areas.