"Jobless growth in India is not merely a statistical artefact but a reflection of low social value attached to skilled manual work." Comment.

Official data show employment rising — roughly 36% growth, about 170 million jobs added between 2016-17 and 2022-23, with the Worker Population Ratio up 9 percentage points [1]. "Jobless growth" is therefore inaccurate as headcount, but accurate as a statement about job quality — and the statement rightly locates one root of that deficit in the low esteem attached to skilled manual work.

Growth in numbers, deficit in quality

• Services generate over half of national output but less than a third of jobs, most informal and low-paying; 87% of services workers lack social security [2].
• Manufacturing has not absorbed surplus agricultural and informal labour, unlike the East Asian structural-transformation path.
• Hence the "artefact" charge is only half-right: the numbers are real, the productivity and wage content of those jobs is thin.

Where the social-value argument holds

• Only 4.2% of persons aged 15-59 have received formal vocational or technical training (PLFS Annual Report 2025) [3], despite a large ITI–polytechnic network and a restructured Skill India Programme [4].
• Vocational streams are widely treated as a residual option for those who fail in general education, reinforced by caste-linked stigma against manual work.
• The result is a paradox of educated unemployment alongside employer skill shortages, with aspiration concentrated on scarce white-collar posts.

Why the explanation is partial

• Demand-side constraints — subdued private investment, pervasive informality and a K-shaped post-pandemic recovery — limit job creation regardless of attitudes.
• Training quality, weak industry linkage and thin apprenticeship absorption blunt even willing entrants [4].

Social devaluation of skilled work is thus a genuine and under-recognised cause, but it operates alongside structural demand deficits rather than replacing them. Mainstreaming vocational exposure within school education, strengthening industry-linked apprenticeships, and extending social security to informal workers can simultaneously raise both the dignity and the productivity of manual work — giving substance to Article 41's promise of the right to work and to the Viksit Bharat goal of an innovation-driven economy.