Half Baked Ideas - Putting India to Work: a new approach put more Indians in jobs

Venue: Seminar Room, 147-149 Barry Street

Presenters: Sahil Shekhar

Despite two decades of economic growth, more than 70 percent of urban Indian workers don’t have formal sector jobs. This vast majority is excluded from India’s remarkable progress: their wages are twenty times lower, they don’t enjoy worker protections, and they can’t access formal credit.

Programs to boost formal sector employment typically fall into two broad categories: job creation (through investment in infrastructure and regulatory reform) and skill development (through boosting tertiary and vocational education). While these efforts are important, we argue that a third, neglected approach could prove to be the most effective medium term strategy to put more Indians in jobs: fixing the education to employment transition in India.

Sahil Shekhar is an entrepreneur working to make labor markets more efficient and meritocratic. Sahil has also worked with various Indian governments on education and employment-related topics.

This talk will explore inefficiencies in the education and labor markets that prevent matching the right candidate with the right skills for the right job. We also discuss promising technological and institutional innovations that may fix these inefficiencies in the near future.

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/7022-half-baked-ideas-putting-india-to-work-a-new