There is a sense of deep pessimism about employment situation among Indian households, according to the Reserve Bank of India¡¯s monthly Consumer Confidence Survey for September.?
This index came into being in September 2012 and for the first time since then, a vast majority of respondents asserted that the employment situation in India had worsened.?
REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE. AFP
According to a report in The Times Of India, as many as 52.5 per cent felt the situation had become worse, while an additional 33.4 per cent of respondents felt that the employment situation would only get worse in the coming year.?
At the same time, almost 26.7 percent of the people said that their own income had decreased.?
However, a majority of 53 per cent people anticipated that their income would increase in the coming year while 9.6 per cent of the people felt that it will go down.
REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE. AFP
What is more worrying from these figures is that almost 47.9 per cent of the households felt that the overall economic situation in the country had worsened.?
An additional 31.8 per cent felt the situation will only worsen further in the coming year.?
As per TOI, the perceptions about the overall economic situation also seem to be influencing people¡¯s spending choices, with the proportions of those reporting that their spending on non-essential items had gone down or had remained the same being the highest since Sep 2015, from which month this data is available.?
REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE. AFP
The survey was conducted in 13 major cities. These included the eight largest metros ¨C Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad ¨C and seven other state capitals in Bhopal, Guwahati, Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna and Thiruvananthapuram. It polled 5,192 households.
Over the past couple of months, thousands of jobs have been lost in India, particularly in the auto sector. The textile industry too is bearing the brunt of the economic crisis while the agriculture sector is also under distress.?