Mission ‘Hundred Million Jobs’ launched in India to boost employment rates

New Delhi: A group of industry leaders on Monday joined hands to launch Hundred Million Jobs (HMJ), a national initiative to create 10 crore jobs in India over the next decade.

The collaborative platform launched by Harish Mehta, co-founder of Nasscom, A.J. Patel, founder of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), and K. Yatish Rajawat, founder of The Centre for Innovation in Public Policy (CIPP), comes as India faces a unique situation of a rapidly growing economy and a dearth of jobs.

India’s continued expansion of its working-age population adds 12 million people annually. The country needs to generate 8-9 million jobs every year for the next decade to absorb new entrants into the workforce and realise its demographic dividend.

“Building on the skills-driven success of nasscom and the global entrepreneurship ecosystem created by TiE, the Hundred Million Jobs Mission is a systems-led effort to strengthen job creators — entrepreneurs, MSMEs, and employers — by aligning skills, enterprise, data, and policy to deliver resilient, dignified livelihoods for the next generation,” said Harish Mehta, Co-Founder, nasscom, in a statement.

“Startups and small enterprises generate 30 per cent of India’s GDP and are the largest employment generators. We are focusing on building the entrepreneurial engine of India in the small towns and districts of India. If India is to generate 8-9 million jobs a year, some structural barriers need to be addressed so entrepreneurship becomes an aspiration for many and a practical engine of mass employment,” added A.J. Patel, Founder, TiE, the largest Indian entrepreneur network in the world.

While the Indian economy remains among the fastest growing in the world, employment growth has not kept pace.

Automation and artificial intelligence are changing business models and reducing the number of traditional entry-level roles across industries, both in services and manufacturing. Economic growth risks are becoming increasingly disconnected from job creation. This challenge also presents a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs to create job-intensive industries.

To counter this, Hundred Million Jobs places entrepreneurship and reskilling at the top of India’s employment strategy, alongside other important pillars that need strengthening.

The organisation’s goal is to ensure dignified, distributed, and resilient job creation becomes the central measure of India’s development.

“India’s job challenge is largely a systems challenge. Employment at scale depends on several factors, like business models and labour-intensive sectors, but most importantly, it needs a mindset shift at the business and government level. The policy challenge is to embed job growth as a centerpiece of economic growth,” said K. Yatish Rajawat, Founder-CEO, The Centre For Innovation Policy.

“The Hundred Million Jobs mission responds to this by strengthening and advancing a seven-pillar framework developed to enable job creation in a distributed manner across India,” he added.

Hundred Million Jobs is structured as a collaborative platform that is supported by leadership from industry, civil society, and government.

IANS