India is growing fast after the recovery, but non-farm job creation is extremely slow. At least 6 million young join the labour force year, but youth unemployment is still double what it was 10 years ago. Tens of millions of unemployed, plus surplus labour in agriculture, also need to be provided non-farm jobs. We will explore what is the nature of the employment crisis, and how it is related to a structural reversal in the economy in the last decade, and the reasons for it. We will also briefly discuss what can be done to create more jobs, at reasonable wages, before India's demographic dividend runs out.

The conference will feature speakers Santosh Mehrotra, a Visiting Professor of Development Economics at Bath University in the UK, best-selling author of India Unbound, Gurcharan Das, and Soumya Kapoor Mehta, a Senior Social Specialist with the Social Sustainability and Inclusion (SSI) global practice at the World Bank.

This conference is part of IIEP's Envisioning India series, in partnership with the Sigur Institute for Asian Studies.