The World Bank has warned of a jobs crisis in the G20 countries. There are over half a billion people in G20 nations who are either unemployed or are working poor which means their wages are below $2 per day. The World Bank study says that nearly 600 million new jobs need to be created by 2030, just to keep up with population growth in these countries. In this backdrop, India?s latest job creation figures are a cause for concern. In Q4FY14, fewer than 36,000 jobs were created in eight key sectors?the number of regular jobs, in fact, declined by 60,000 from the previous quarter while a little over 24,000 temporary jobs were created.

Given the Union government is focused on giving manufacturing a fillip which, in turn, is likely to boost employment, there is reason to expect the jobs data to improve in the coming quarters. But to ensure this, the government must reform outdated labour laws so that employers are not apprehensive of hiring more workers because of the attendant regulatory burden?something that the state governments must also recognise given labour is a concurrent subject. The Centre, for its part, has announced a single-window digital platform to ease compliance with at least 16 of the Central labour laws. This significantly curtails the ?inspector raj? that these laws have propped up?annually, nearly 1.75 lakh inspections are carried out, with the decision to undertake one being entirely at the discretion of the labour officials. Employers can now annually upload all compliance-related data on a new website while companies are selected for inspection in a random computerised method. As for the states, Rajasthan, as this newspaper has pointed out before, has made the right start in reforming the Factories Act, the Industrial Disputes Act, the Apprentices Act, and the Contract Labour Act. It is time that other states caught up, given how a recent McKinsey report pointed out that states with flexible labour laws had a higher proportion of workers in the organised sector (35.3%) in 2010 than those that didn?t (23.2%).