New Delhi (NVI): Around 6.6 million white-collar professionals, including engineers, physicians and teachers lost their jobs between May and August during the coronavirus lockdown, washing away all employment gains made since 2016, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).
The white-collar jobs employed in the country fell sharply to 12.2 million during May-August 2020, from a peak of 18.8 million during the same period last year.
According to CMIE, this is the lowest level of employment of these professionals since 2016 and all the gains made in their jobs over the past four years were washed away during the lockdown.
These white-collar salaried employees, including engineers, physicians, teachers, accountants, and analysts, were hardest hit due to large scale job losses during the lockdown months.
However, the lockdown did not impact white-collar clerical employees such as desk-work employees ranging from secretaries and office clerks to BPO/KPO workers, and data-entry operators, the CMIE report said.
Interestingly, the lockdown did not impact white collar clerical employees. These include largely, desk-work employees ranging from secretaries and office clerks to BPO/KPO workers, data-entry operators and the types.
Possibly, their work shifted to the Work-from-Home mode, says the report. This category of workers has not been seeing any growth since 2016. In fact, it has slid quite sharply since 2018 from about 15 million to less than 12 million by 2020. Interestingly, it did not slide any further during the lockdown.
Furthermore, the lockdown has hit the industrial workers’ job on a large scale too. “By a similar year-on-year comparison, nearly 5 million industrial workers lost their jobs. This reflects a 26 per cent fall in employment among industrial workers over a year,” as per the CMIE report.
The month of April saw a humungous job loss of 121 million. Also, the decline in employment of industrial workers is likely to be largely in the smaller industrial units, reflecting the distress in the medium, small and micro industrial units in recent times.
However, the relaxation of lockdown has brought some hope that the economy and business condition may improve.
-RJV/ARK
