With rapid urbanisation, the pace of city-bound migration of rural people in search of work has seen a surge in recent times. Small wonder that the city slums which have been growing in size over the years have been teeming with young people born in those shantytowns and who have now grown into youths. Most of them have been either without any work or were engaged in the informal sector of the economy doing low-paid work or running their own self-employment activities. As expected, the fallout of the pandemic has further worsened the situation of these urban youths dislodging them from whatever means of subsistence they had. Worse yet is the fact that not an insignificant number of returnee migrant workers from overseas have meanwhile joined them in recent months.
Some government-run efforts like social safety-net schemes to provide temporary succour apart, so far, there are few programmes focused specifically on these unemployed urban youths. Reassuringly, the recently proposed World Bank (WB) fund to be channelled through a government-run project has thrown a lifeline to the unemployed urban youths. If efficiently organised and operated, jobless urban youths including the returnee migrant workers can amply benefit from the project. In fact, amid the dominant discourse of rural-biased schemes either government-sponsored or foreign-aided, the urban youth project, thus conceived, has undoubtedly turned a long-felt attention to a sector that had generally failed to find much favour with the government or multilateral development partners.
Hopefully, the WB-sponsored project would be properly designed and operated by people who are not just government functionaries running one of many such government projects, but have some real knowledge and experience of working with the targeted urban youths. That is because the problems and challenges faced by this youth section of the labour market, unlike the other members, are rather complex as around 44 per cent of them, according to the WB, are employed in the informal sector. Needless to say, the informal sector of our economy is one that is yet to be exhaustively studied and the range of low-income activities ongoing there are still not properly categorised. Add to those the challenge of including the self-employed section of the urban youths who comprise 17 per cent of the entire youth population.
So, the task of addressing this segment of the labour market, the urban youths, would essentially consist in reintegrating them into the mainstream, the labour market proper, through training and job creation. And so far as the inclusion of the returnee migrant workers in this urban youth-focused project is concerned, the obvious objective would be to ultimately prepare and groom them to find employment in the local job market. While developing any such social reintegration programme for the youths in the informal labour market in question, their status vis-a-vis that of those engaged in the formal labour market needs to be assessed. And, studies show that there is more than 45 per cent income gap between these two categories of workers.
It is important that measures such as skills training are taken for those urban youths in the informal sector to acquire necessary qualifications for formal sector jobs. This may be one of the ways that the project under consideration may adopt to narrow down the income gaps between the two sectors. Especially, the government would be required to support the highly innovative self-employed urban youths over 98 per cent of whom are in the informal sector.