India’s unemployment crisis is well-known and the previous chapters in this volume have analysed it in detail. The big problem of unemployment is caused by increase in working age population, for whom the present economic model is not able to enough generate jobs, despite a moderately high GDP growth rate. This is referred to as “jobless growth”. Yet we maintain that the emphasis on numerical unemployment tends to take attention away from two bigger problems related to employment. A bigger problem than numerical unemployment is inadequate wages and incomes of most of those who are employed. The biggest problem is degradation of the environment and natural resources, which can make existing and future employment unsustainable. In the opening section of this chapter, we analyse each of these three issues, which we refer to as the triad of India’s unemployment crises.
